Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust quickly responds to COVID-19 with Citrix

Locked down and forced to close clinics, hospital enabled 2,000 employees to work from home and maintain continuity of services within 48 hours

London, UK – 16^th June 2020 – COVID-19 hit fast and Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust was equally quick to respond. When government mandates forced the Trust to move staff and patient clinics off the main hospital site, it moved quickly to enable 2,000 employees to work from home and continue providing essential services. And with the help of  Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), they were up and running in less than two days.

“We had to move all our staff out and rapidly transition as many services as we could to remote delivery,” said Mark Hutchinson, executive chief digital information officer (CDIO) for the Trust. “But that’s easier said than done.”

Panic buying

Many hospitals in the same situation rushed to buy hundreds of laptops to support their teams. The Trust went a different route. “We didn’t want to just buy hundreds of expensive laptops that we’d have to set up, distribute out to staff who need them most and then have the challenge of counting them all back in,” Hutchinson said. “But we also knew that individual PCs in people’s homes can be difficult to secure and manage, which is critical when we’re working with confidential patient data.”

A secure, reliable alternative

The Trust chose instead to work with Citrix Gold Solution Advisor LIMA, to implement Citrix® Virtual Apps and Desktops and provide secure, reliable access to the clinical apps and information employees would need to do their jobs from home using personal devices. “We basically said if you have a device,  we'll sort the VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure], we’ll make sure you can easily access all the Trust systems, securely,” Hutchinson said.

Game-changing results

All the Trust’s support and patient administration services now operate remotely through a virtual desktop on the devices of their choice – from Macs to PCs. In addition, “we have senior clinicians at home, self-isolating, who can still be online, securely accessing their patients’ records to monitor their progress and it's been a game-changer for them,” Hutchinson said.

And it was all accomplished in a matter of days. “Citrix enabled us to respond extremely quickly to the unprecedented challenges of Covid-19, and to continue business as usual without any negative impact on patient services,” Hutchinson said. “We’re not scared to say Citrix made all the difference. We couldn’t have moved this quickly without it.”

Citrix provides a complete range of digital workspace solutions designed to ensure that business operations can continue, no matter the disruption. Click here to learn more about these solutions and how your organisation can use them to enable seamless workforce productivity, giving employees the flexibility to work from anywhere in a safe manner, all while keeping your apps and information secure.

About Citrix

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is powering a better way to work with unified workspace, networking, and analytics solutions that help organisations unlock innovation, engage customers, and boost productivity, without sacrificing security. With Citrix, users get a seamless work experience and IT has a unified platform to secure, manage, and monitor diverse technologies in complex cloud environments. Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organisations including 98 percent of the Fortune 500.