Case Studies
Yorkshire Ambulance Service
YAS
Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust was formed on 1 July 2006 bringing together South Yorkshire Ambulance Service, West Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service and the North and East Yorkshire parts of Tees, East and North Yorkshire Ambulance Service. The new Trust had a need to standardise it’s Command and Control function onto a single platform, and at the same time build a model which provided maximum resilience and Disaster Recovery facilities. The decision was taken to use the existing MIS Command and Control system as the platform, and to implement a ‘Virtual Control’ solution across the region. As part of the rationalisation process the existing 3 Control Centers were to be reduced to two main centers, with disaster recovery management facilities being provided from either site. Phase 1 saw the roll-out of the Alert C3 system in the York Control Centre which was completed in September 2007 and was introduced alongside a Trust wide implementation of SAN infrastructure. The SAN solution provides a very high level of local resilience for the Command and Control system. Database Mirroring across the across the wide area network to the Wakefield site was implemented to provide a real-time DR solution. Phase 2 involved the closure of the Rotherham Control Centre and the staff and services being re-located in a custom designed Control Centre adjacent to the old, still live, Wakefield Center. This major project included a full control room design and build, with sufficient capacity to take both the Rotherham services and the Wakefield services and at the same time provide the capacity to deal with the DR requirements for York. During the Control Room build phase our ICT department carried extensive remote client tests in conjunction with MIS to ensure that the Command and Control system would operate remotely in exactly the same way that it was operating locally at York. As a result of these tests minor changes were made to the Command and Control software which further improved the performance of the remote clients, and reduced the bandwidth required to within very acceptable levels. The re-located Rotherham Control operation was implemented and fully functional on 4th June 2008, with some 20 remote clients using the centralised York database, providing what is essentially the first Alert C3 ‘Virtual Control Centre’ in the country. The next phase will be the migration of the Wakefield (West Yorkshire) users from the Alert 2000 system over to the Alert C3. The new single database solution will provide significant benefits both on an operational and management information front. Preparatory work has already begun and we expect the changeover to be completed early autumn 2008. David Johnson Assistant Director - ICT YAS NHS Trust
