NHS Scotland Upgrades its Print Operations

NHS Scotland employees and patients should soon notice a big improvement in the quality of printed material they receive

With the installation of new software products from Integrated Document Solutions (IDS), Formscape and Mobius Management Systems along with new Xerox DP65 laser printers and PFE sealers, NHS Scotland will soon be able to produce more informative and attractive letters and forms and also has the potential to cut down on the amount of preprinted stationery it uses.

"The new systems offer us the opportunity to give out information in a more professional manner," said John Allison, project manager with SchlumbergerSema, the company that provides IT services to NHS Scotland including the management of ICL mainframe operations. "Because impact printers were limited in what they could print and conventional hard coded programming needed time to effect change, we traditionally steered away from using volatile information such as telephone numbers, names, signatures and logos. This has changed with the ease of use and flexibility of new document composition software and we can now produce much better customer-facing documentation more quickly than before."

"SpoolQ will help replace microfiche systems and will also save the expense of reprinting reports"

SchlumbergerSema operates NHS Scotland’s ICL Trimetra mainframe in Dundee and has four combined development, service support and print sites in Dundee, Paisley, Inverness and Edinburgh providing desktop, network, applications, consultancy, project and service management services. Links for printing between these sites were previously via an ICL proprietary Oslan connection, but with the installation of SpoolQ in all four print sites, communications can now take place over standard TCP/IP connections to the laser printers.

SpoolQ’s ability to direct print output to a separate document archive system will also be put to good use. This means that if anyone wants to call up a copy of a previous print job, they will now be able to view the printed output on the screen of their desktop PC. This will help replace microfiche systems and will also save the expense of reprinting reports.

"SpoolQ redirects the print data through the FormScape document composition software and the complete image of the printed document can now also be stored and viewed electronically in our ViewDirect document retrieval system," says Allison. "It gives us more options. In the past, output was always printed. Now we have the added ability to view on-line or even email as required by our customers."

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