IT Group: Aidan Furey & Frances Lynch

On the initial work morning, the entire PLAYING FOR LIFE group were given a tour of St Joseph’s hospital. The hospital manager gave a rundown of many of the issues that the hospital faces from day to day, and we were brought through many areas of the hospital including some of the wards. Frances and I were introduced to Jezman who worked in the hospital pharmacy. He went into detail about many of the IT issues at the hospital. As a result, we looked at resolving the following over the period we were there:

Hospital IT Goals:

• Recover the existing database which tracked medicines/consumables at the hospital pharmacy
• Enable the operation of up to 10 pc’s which were not working
• Establish a network in the hospital

Unfortunately, the initial goal of recovering the database was unsuccessful. The computer which had stored the database was corrupted, and while many of the records were recovered, the database itself could not be restored. We decided to build a new database created specifically to meet the needs of the pharmacy. As time was short and due to the number of hardware issues present at the hospital, it was decided that the new database could be built remotely and emailed to the hospital at a later date. The new pharmacy database is due for completion by late November 2010.

A large number of PC’s at the hospital were no longer working. Frances worked with Peter - the hospital radiologist - in restoring these PC’s. A new operating system and a copy of Microsoft Office was installed on each computer, and Peter was shown how to address the initial issues which had caused each of the computers to break down.

A hospital wide IT network was required to establish easy access to files and allow multiple users of the pharmacy database. Much of the IT infrastructure required to establish the hospital network was already in place. There was however no designated server, making hospital file sharing and archiving difficult. A new server was installed and different departments such as the Pharmacy, Accounts, and Human Resources are now linked.

Without proper care and maintenance, the IT system at the hospital will ultimately fail. To help prevent this, we had a discussion with both the management of the hospital and the principle of the local school. The school has a formal IT training course which enrols a small number of students each year – specialising in computer software training. As this course has no hardware training element and the hospital was in need of personnel capable of maintaining the network, it was suggested that the two locations collaborate in order to provide both education to the student and support to the hospital. Both sides seemed interested in the idea.

On the last day, Jezman presented both Frances and I with gifts which he had purchased from the local market. It was a very generous thing for him to do – something for which we are both extremely grateful.