Peter Farbrace Email & Phone Number

Kent, Medway & Surrey

Managing the Support Services function across the entire NEL Customer base

Kent & Canterbury Hospital

Lead the delivery of a high quality, professional IM&T infrastructure service to the constituent Trusts across Kent & Medway, ensuring service continuity and system security for clinical and business critical systems, through the overall management of the IM&T infrastrucuture services.Key responsibilities include:• Ensuring effective operations management of infrastructure systems• Driving operational efficiencies without compromising quality of service• Ensuring effective customer communication• Project implementation & delivery • Resource capability and capacity management

Responsible for managing the infrastructure teams that look after three trusts and over 7000 users. Managing the infrastructure on a day-to-day basis and ensuring we move with the times – future proofing the IT infrastructure whist ensuring value for money. Implementing changes within the teams and actively monitoring them to ensure delivery of service. Implementing policies and procedures in line with customers’ requests, taking responsibility for managing and meeting customer expectations.

The first part of this job involved gathering information from Desktop teams across Kent to aid the formation of the Health Informatics service. Looking at best practice across the patch and applying where necessary. Ensuring value for money was being achieved across the trusts, taking part and acting as technical lead for the Kent wide E-auction. The last 2 years of this post were spent dedicated to East Kent Hospitals Trust. I formed the installation team and re-organised the desktop teams to enable a smoother operation. I had to make strategic decisions on a regular basis and often worked to tight deadlines and under pressure.

As PC Support Manager I lead a team of 8 people to support and install equipment over 5 main hospitals and 25 remote sites. I made strategic decisions that allowed the trust to meet deadlines and carry out major projects. Day to day duties included monitoring the helpdesk ensuring problems were being dealt with promptly and if necessary I made changes to teams to help keep calls under control. I have took part in several large clinical projects, ensuring that they ran as smoothly as possible and made sure all desktop infrastructure was in place. This included making important decisions quickly. I also worked in an advisory manner with colleagues within primary care, helping them to sort out technical problems and advising on projects.

After being promoted to this position I was responsible for the support of 600 PCs and accompanying peripherals. I led the support team taking responsibility for decisions and acting upon them. Working alongside department managers, I assisted in prioritising requests to enable a rapid turnaround. I had to support the machines for both software and hardware problems and fast telephone support was also required. During this period I also managed the Year 2000 project, making sure there were no problems with PCs especially in patient critical areas. Other duties included the physical set-up of the network and maintaining the site's Firewall.

This post involved assisting to maintain the Local Area Network including the remote locations. As a PC Support officer my duties included PC maintenance and software installations on to the 500 computers throughout the trust. During this period I was working and also studying to gain my NVQ Level 3.