NATIONAL SCHOOL OF HEALTHCARE SCIENCE (NSHCS) was established in October 2011 to support the implementation and delivery of the new healthcare science education and training programmes.

The aim of the new educational programmes is to train staff that will be able to work at the highest level in healthcare, understanding and advising on the most recent advances in technology and innovations in patient care, and to have the flexibility and adaptability to work across patient pathways enabling efficient and high quality care.

"Glasscubes' online workspaces contain of set of group working tools specifically designed to help teams collaborate around content and we have been able to introduce a more effective way for our distributed teams to work together. Glasscubes have been first rate to work with, they are responsive, helpful and really good listeners."

STUART SUTHERLAND Head of Information and Digital Systems, NSHCS

The Challenge

The NSHCS is hosted by Health Education England (HEE) West Midlands. It safeguards the delivery of quality education and training for healthcare science nationally and liaise with all relevant organisations to ensure smooth transition, continued accountability and governance is maintained within the new national educational architecture. They needed an easier and more efficient way for people to co-create documents and collaborate around scientific topics across multiple distributed teams.

Stuart Sutherland Head of Information and Digital Systems explains, "We work with a lot of external associates in the co-creation of documents that are vital to the running of the many training programmes we manage – curriculum documents, assessments, policies, strategic plans. These are all people that are not employed by the organisation but whose work we facilitate and rely upon. With email being the only ‘reliable’ tool that these groups had access to for collaboration and file sharing, we had the inevitable potentially chaotic and unproductive situation whereby document creation and group discussion were fragmented and disorganised across multiple email threads."

Email makes life difficult for teams that regularly need to share files and collaborate around their content. There had to be a better way to work so the NSHCS went in search of finding it.

Being a healthcare organisation linked to the NHS the NSHCS needed to find a reliable and secure solution and turned to the Digital Marketplace, the Government’s framework for procuring Cloud Services.

"We shortlisted a number of suppliers from the Digital Marketplace and then used a balanced scoring method to benchmark each of them against an internally agreed set of criteria. We eventually choose Glasscubes after a number of side by side trials because of a combination of price and quality. It handles document control really well, it doesn’t need any additional extensions to any software and it’ simple to use which has made our adoption of the platform high and well received." said Sutherland.

The Solution

The NSHCS adopted Glasscubes and set up a number of secure online workspaces that their distributed team members are invited to and can then access from anywhere, on any device. Rather than sending information across email, the teams post their content directly onto their workspaces.

Members of the workspace can then quickly get access to all of the latest updates, tasks and files from a single, contained central area. All of the documents are version controlled, with the latest copy displayed, so there is only ever the latest, most recent version available to the entire team to refer to. Glasscubes also has a great alerting feature that enables team members to be notified of any new updates that might be relevant to them.