SVHA - a leader in healthcare
St Vincent’s Health Australia (SVHA) is a not-for-profit health and aged care provider. With over 23,000 staff operating six public hospitals, 10 private hospitals and 20 aged care facilities, it is the largest organisation of its kind in the country. SVHA facilities along the eastern seaboard provide over 3,000 hospital beds and 2,400 aged care residential places.
As well as patient care, SVHA is a leader in clinical education and medical research, working closely with research institutes, other health care providers and universities.
With a healthcare operation on this scale, SVHA of course relies heavily on technology. The organisation is undergoing a digital transformation program to enable staff the tools needed to further increase efficiency and innovation in patient service, teaching and research.
Digital transformation needs expert resources
Digital transformation requires not just technology, but crucially the skilled technical resources and project managers to implement it. In a large organisation like SVHA, it can be a challenge to have exactly the right level of resources at the right time, as projects ramp up and down. That challenge has been exacerbated by the uncertainties of the pandemic. So SVHA needs a reliable source of skilled staff to enable them to flex the workforce for projects, or to backfill regular staff when they are away. That’s where IMI plays an essential role.
Ken Gallacher, Group CIO, Digital & Technology, explains: “Over the last 18 months, we’ve had a lot going on, as you can imagine. The most obvious one is the pressure placed on any healthcare organisation by COVID, and the difficulty in recruiting people to work in a hospital setting during a pandemic.”
“But we’ve also had some very significant projects in that time, moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and transitioning staff to home working. On top of that, we carried out a major strategic review of our desktop service operating model. Throughout all of that, IMI provided us with short-term and fixed-term staff - people with the right skills, on-premises, across all three states in which we operate. Having the IMI team available has made a big difference to the way we are able to adapt and scale”.
Right skills, right place, right time
Barry Mather, SVHA’s Leader of Digital Transformation continues the story: “I need to know I can call on skilled staff, sometimes at short notice, for technical activities. IMI has exactly the right people, and can get them to me when I need them. Of the 50 in my team, I might have between three and four from IMI on a regular basis, increasing to as many as eight to ten when we have a significant project underway. They’re primarily level two desktop support staff, but we also have IMI project managers too.”
Hitting the ground running
“The biggest plus of the IMI team is that they are familiar with us”, says Barry. “They understand our systems and the way we work. Because of our history, of a number of separate facilities coming together to now have a national focus, we have a lot of legacy systems and huge amount of complexity in how they interact. It’s not an easy environment, and having people that know our technical environment, our staff and our executive style means that they can hit the ground running.”
High calibre staff driving outstanding results
Ken and Barry value the relationship and support they have from IMI. “They understand the kind of people we are looking for”, says Barry, “not just the technical skills, but the attributes needed to work in our organisation.”
Ken adds: “The calibre of IMI staff is of the highest order. They specialise in desktops and they do it very well. Their skills are very current and often very deep. I know that anyone that IMI sends us is going to be good, and the team have achieved some amazing results.”
“IMI are also very flexible and pragmatic. On the upgrade project, when we had some delays around getting access to computers, IMI stayed the course with us. They fitted around our requirements, whereas other suppliers would have downed tools.”
Capable, Committed, Flexible
The decision to collaborate with IMI to provide a strong team to complement SVHA’s own resources is one that both Barry and Ken are very pleased they made. “If I had to sum up the best things about working with IMI”, says Ken, “I would say that it’s their immense capability, their commitment and their flexibility. They’ve given us the ability to continue to deliver our service through the pandemic and everything else that life in a frontline healthcare service throws at us.”
