During the COVID-19 pandemic, F5 ensures safe and stable remote work for Lancashire hospitals in the UK

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the leading healthcare providers in the North West of England, covering Lancashire and South Cumbria. The institution provides medical services to more than 1.5 million people and provides medical education for students at the University of Manchester and the University of St Andrews. The Trust also operates a trauma center that provides leading pathology services, is an important part of the National Health Service system, and has been designated as one of a dozen key testing centers for COVID-19 across the UK.

As the impact of the epidemic gradually intensified, the Trust Foundation realized that more clinical and administrative staff needed to work remotely. However, the existing remote access solution could only support up to 500 users at the same time. During the epidemic, the hospital was under tremendous pressure to maintain the provision of comprehensive basic medical services. How to solve this challenge and provide emergency services related to the new crown epidemic is particularly important for the hospital.

Saeed Umar, head of technical services at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: "As a healthcare organization, some of our staff still need to work on site. However, in order to minimize the risk of infection, we ask clinical and administrative staff to work from home where possible." Faced with such a sudden shift, the number of people working from home will increase, which means that the demand for instant, fast and secure access to online systems will also surge.

Choose F5 Remote Access Solutions

In order to ensure uninterrupted business, the foundation contacted F5 and FullProxy to determine future options. Fortunately, the foundation has been using F5 products for nearly eight years. During this period, the foundation has been using the F5 BIG-IP iSeries platform in active/passive mode to host applications internally and achieve system load balancing.

Last year, the Trust began working with F5 and FullProxy to enhance the capabilities of its existing solutions. As a result, the organization replaced its existing remote access solution with F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), which integrates and unifies secure user access with the flexibility and performance required to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right applications, anytime, anywhere.

Business continuity is effectively guaranteed

The flexible and strong relationship between the Foundation, F5, and FullProxy, including the rapid configuration support provided by FullProxy engineers, enabled the project to be completed in a much shorter time than expected. Stephen Dobson, Chief Information Officer of Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: "F5 and FullProxy understood the urgency of our needs and responded quickly to provide licenses and all related support services immediately after we made the decision to upgrade our existing F5 solution. After receiving the request to help deal with the potential impact of the new crown epidemic, F5 and FullProxy began upgrading the existing system within a few hours and increased the maximum number of concurrent remote users to 2,000. This allows us to have more responsiveness in a few hours instead of days or even months."

Because clinical and administrative staff can securely access the application, the Trust’s business continuity is ensured, enabling it to continue to provide world-class medical services to patients, even at the peak of the pandemic, when the number of concurrent remote users surged from 70 to more than 700 per day.

The Trust now has seamless access to the application and is using Microsoft Teams on a larger scale, which has increased collaboration between team members, improved staff morale, and helped them achieve work-life balance during unprecedented difficult times. No one’s ability to work has been negatively affected, and staff have given positive feedback. Jonathan Wood, deputy chief executive of Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Even though our remote users have increased tenfold, the user experience has not been affected at all. Our staff are so impressed that they are even talking about it on social media.”

The successful introduction of F5’s secure access solution has prompted the Trust to consider allowing more employees to work from home permanently. This new remote working model will also help save costs associated with physical infrastructure and equipment management, while also laying the foundation for responding to future COVID-19 outbreaks or other unexpected situations that may increase remote access requirements.

As workers around the world begin to self-isolate, technology has become a bond that brings people together. Overcoming the epidemic is inseparable from the mutual support and help between people, and even more inseparable from the support of digital technology. As a global leader in multi-cloud application security and application delivery technology, F5 assists customers in maintaining business continuity and ensuring the normal operation of application systems, while protecting data security and helping customers overcome difficulties during this special period full of uncertainty.