CIO interview: Deryck Mitchelson, director of digital, NHS Scotland

There are daily reports on the pressure the coronavirus is putting on the health services of the UK’s devolved nations.

While it may be hard to fathom that IT service management has a role to play in managing a pandemic, for Deryck Mitchelson, director of digital and chief information security officer at NHS National Services Scotland, Covid-19 was a catalyst for change.

The organisation Mitchelson has worked for over the last two and a half years provides central services for NHS Scotland, including the National Blood Transfusion Service, shared IT services, human resources (HR), finance and procurement.

From an IT perspective, before the pandemic, NHS National Services Scotland had embarked on rolling out Microsoft Office 365, says Mitchelson. The IT services it provides across NHS Scotland include wide-area network (WAN) as a service and security as a service. It also runs mainframes and hosts a number of critical websites for NHS Scotland. One of these is the community health index (CHI), a unique identifier, which Mitchelson says links every piece of health data that is recorded across NHS Scotland.

NHS Scotland began using ServiceNow three years ago to provide IT service management (ITSM), he says. “We matured our ITSM and looked at building workflows such as for HR and business logic. Covid-19 is where we saw how we could scale out ITSM.”

At the start of the pandemic, the first opportunity to do this was in managing the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) to front-line staff at NHS Scotland. “We had to ensure there was enough PPE at the right place at the right time,” says Mitchelson.

Demand was greater than the ability to supply PPE, which meant equipment needed to be procured from abroad, with orders sometimes being fulfilled by suppliers that NHS Scotland had not previously worked with.

“Covid-19 is where we saw how we could scale out ITSM”

Deryck Mitchelson, NHS Scotland

“We created a custom app to manage supply and demand in ServiceNow, to understand the data and provide a dashboard, which was the best way to show to management that we were sourcing the right stuff and getting it to the front line,” he says.

The shortage of PPE meant that NHS Scotland needed new suppliers, some of which were outside the EU and the UK. And management needed to know that the PPE had actually turned up, says Mitchelson. “We had people waiting at Prestwick airport, checking if big pallets of PPE would be there.”

Although there are many approaches the team could have taken to building an app to track the procurement and deployment of PPE, Mitchelson believes ITSM offered the best approach because it can be applied to asset management. “ITSM is about managing data and intelligent workflows,” he says.

For example, he points out that ITSM deals with objects such as HR or computer resources, and a common case is the joiners and leavers process in HR. “You need to manage data and trigger actions,” he adds.