Mental Health Matters
Posted on: 13th February 2024
The Client
Mental Health Matters is a national charity with 40 years’ experience of providing innovative, life-changing mental health support for individuals and communities.
The charity supports more than 15,000 people every month through its social services. In 2022/23 the helpline answered 54,473 calls for support and 6640 webchat sessions, while 40,818 people entered into talking therapies in MHM or partner services.
The Challenge
The overall challenge lies in supporting around 700 staff over 70+ sites, delivering a wide variety of mental health services including: helpline/webchat, mental health and wellbeing support, advice and information, advocacy, crisis support, employment support, housing, peer support, therapy and counselling, user voice, and training.
All of this needs an IT infrastructure that puts the right workload in the right place 24/7, backed up by expert support and ongoing consultancy and advice.
As demand sees MHM continue to grow year on year, it needs a managed service partner who can enable and support its move to a more agile digital platform in line with its transformation strategy, and deliver increased flexibility and more visible costs across its operations. Included in this aim is mobilisation of new services to quickly and smoothly set up new service locations and onboard new staff, all at predictable costs.
Our Solution
ITPS has been MHM’s strategic IT partner for the last decade, providing a fully outsourced service which involves consultancy and delivery across a portfolio of cloud, connectivity, cyber security, managed services, and professional services.
The partnership sees ITPS support MHM’s technology roadmap which dovetails with its five-year digital transformation plan and maintains a resilient, future proof IT infrastructure. This enables it to react to opportunities in a fast-moving business environment where speed is essential to set up projects that will quickly help more people access mental health support, and support staff delivering those services.
In a deliberate move, the managed service element is separate from infrastructure, to maintain absolute flexibility of either element, wrapped in a contract that provides best value for money for a charity with a keen focus on securing cost effectiveness.
One of the key current projects involves helping MHM through its digital transformation journey, from its on-premise, locally hosted hardware in the ITPS Tier 3 data centre into Microsoft Azure public cloud, creating a highly secure, scaleable and flexible environment that will underpin dynamic growth. The move will deliver all the hyper-scaleability and technology suite compatibility that MHM requires now and in the future, coupled with the security of a local, highly expert partner on hand to manage the service wrap.
The managed service sees ITPS deliver a package including remote monitoring and end user support, including 24/7 support for certain sites, Microsoft licensing management, AV, wireless and remote monitoring management, asset and patch management as well as technical consultancy.
The security of MHM’s systems and data - which must be stored for 20 years - is paramount, and the service includes regular vulnerability scanning and security posture reviews designed to spot any potential problems.
Reporting and continuous service improvement is delivered through weekly and monthly meetings with the Account Director, Service Delivery Lead and Lead Engineers; plus monthly service reviews and quarterly business reviews with senior management from both organisations.
The Outcome
MHM’s IT and Data Manager Paul Robinson said:
“Our relationship with ITPS goes back a decade, and their combination of high level technical expertise and service knowledge coupled with their willingness to go that extra mile, is what makes them such a key partner for us.
Like many others, we’ve moved to a hybrid working model for many traditionally office-based staff, along with many of our people working in outreach. They need the tools, data and support to be able to work on the move to allow us to deliver better services to our clients. Our commissioners place great emphasis on secure inter-operability, which is what our partnership with ITPS helps us to deliver.
We have a strong relationship with ITPS with a core group of people who really understand the charity, and who we know are in turn backed up by a team with wide-ranging expertise, and who can be called upon when needed.
Over the years we’ve developed an open dialogue with a high level of trust and confidence, both sides have a commitment to the partnership. They’ll often bring us ideas and suggestions about how we can engage with the latest technology that adds value to our organisation. They regularly go above and beyond expectations and show a genuine level of care for us.
While technology allows us to empower our staff to do what can be a very difficult but rewarding job, my role is to support our people, who in turn support our clients. ITPS understands and fully supports me in that role. It’s a classic case of using tech for good.”
Paul Robinson Mental Health Matters | IT and Data Manager
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