The covid pandemic presented enormous challenges to NHS IT teams. Almost overnight, they had to cope with large numbers of staff working from home and staff who were redeployed into different areas.

This created demands on areas such as service desks but also concerns around security and access as people worked in different locations, sometimes using their home wifi. At the same time, many IT departments will have had longer term plans to streamline and improve processes which they may have wanted to progress despite the rapidly-changing circumstances.

How IT departments coped with these demands contains lessons, not just for future periods of extreme pressure but for more normal times, specifically around maintaining IT service operations efficiency.

This HSJ webinar asked: 

• The pandemic put additional pressures on service desks, dealing with problems and queries from staff working in unfamiliar situations and different ways. How did they cope with this and what improvements were they able to make? 
• IT security remained important throughout the pandemic. How did trusts and clinical commissioning groups ensure high standards of security were achieved despite the changes in how and where people were working? 
• How did IT departments manage to progress their long-term plans to make necessary improvements at a time of such pressure? 
• What are the lessons from the pandemic which IT leaders can embed into their organisations and how can they harness enterprise service management processes to support activities across the NHS?

The webinar was chaired by HSJ contributor Claire Read.