Pathology Application Support

at  Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust

Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services (BSPS) is a joint venture between Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Surrey and Sussex NHS Trust, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust delivering pathology services to both acute and primary care patients across the network area.
The role of Pathology Applications Support is to ensure that IT administration tasks associated with the day to day running of a range of Pathology IT applications are handled in an effective and efficient manner. Handling of queries with regards to Pathology Applications from both GPs and trust staff is vital in ensuring that Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services maintain a close relationship with their users.
This is a hands-on role and as part of the support service you will be required to answer queries via email, self service requests and by phone in a timely manner ensuring that all work requests are logged in accordance with current practice, that minimum data sets are adhered to and that appropriate triage and resolution on first contact is the primary objective.
You will be required to liaise with third party suppliers and contractors to ensure incidents are resolved within agreed SLAs for that system or service.
Excellent organisational and communication skills are a vital part of this role as constant telephone and VDU usage is required to support end users and the team, so an ability to concentrate on demanding tasks and deal with issues supportively is essential.
There’s never been a more exciting time to build your career at Frimley Health, one of the country’s largest and most respected trusts
Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust (FHFT) has an outstanding reputation and a proud record of achievement. We have an ongoing commitment to improving the health and care services for the 900,000 people we serve across Berkshire, Hampshire, Surrey and south Buckinghamshire.
We continue to invest in our services and facilities, including a £10 million upgrade to the hospital maternity unit as well as £49m major new Emergency Assessment Centre on our Wexham Park site. The opening of a brand new £100m state of the art hospital which replaced the existing hospital facility at Heatherwood and are planning to invest further in diagnostics and inpatient capacity at Frimley Park.
We have also made significant investment in our quality improvement and digital programmes to support our vision and we will ensure that we achieve our aim of providing the highest quality healthcare to our patients. Our new EPR – Epic – went live in June and we are already beginning to reap the benefits of this ambitious investment .
Our three core values , and the behaviours that support them, guide everything we do and set out what we expect of our staff in the way they treat patients, visitors, service users and each other.
If you have a passion for clinical excellence, patient care and your own career development, you’ll feel at home at Frimley Health.
The post holder will help with the administration tasks and support the use of Pathology IT applications. This will include out of hours cover and travel to other hospital sites and GP practices

Answer and respond to emails, Self Service requests and Phone calls.
Ensure minimum data sets are gathered for all tickets logged in the CRM application.
Maintain the system event log.
Manage the applications to ensure a robust service with maximised uptime for the end users and with agreed SLAs
Undertake support with application enquires/problems/requests and faults received in accordance with Service Level Agreements and Trust standards
Create user accounts for Pathology IT applications and systems and accuracy of data is a key component to maintain clinical systems
Complete user account maintenance activities
Ensure new staff and leavers are administrated in an appropriate and timely manner
Provide application support for Pathology users both internal and external and maintain an effective working relationship with all users and encourage them to follow a specific agreed course of action.
Escalation of issues to second line support and/or external suppliers as appropriate
Send technical IT related communications as required.
Will be required to engage with staff and GPs with varying degrees of IT skills and knowledge be it in writing, orally or electronically to trouble shoot issues and for training purposes.
Take ownership of the logged calls and follow up the status of problems on behalf of the user and communicate progress in a timely manner.
Work as part of a rota covering the out of hours of the Pathology IT.
Support the contingency strategies and plans as required and assist with Business continuity.
Participate in testing of business continuity / downtime plans for systems
Support the project teams as required with testing for projects and BAU changes. Testing will need to be evidenced on spreadsheets for sign off as part of larger projects
Act as first line support to triage incoming calls and prioritise based on number of sites, affected users and clinical impact.
Ability to recognise when to escalate the call to senior staff, instigate communications or inform Trust CIO/or CCIO both in and Out of Hours
Ensure that a rigorous approach is taken to data quality by yourself and any members of the team when making system changes.
Identify data quality issues to the Pathology IT Manager and suggest activities to improve data quality. Assist in taking preventative action
Expected to plan and organise own workload
Ensure compliance with Trust policies for Data Protection Act and Caldicott Principles on patient confidentiality.
Whilst not the primary task of the post holder, the post holder, on request, will assist the management of Pathology in the smooth running of the pathology applications administrative function, and will provide day to day office administration tasks