Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough
A Modern Intranet connecting staff at Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough. How Stratos helped Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough implement a new SharePoint Intranet and connect health staff across Te Tauihu
How Stratos helped Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough implement a new SharePoint Intranet and connect health staff across Te Tauihu
About Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough
Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough (previously known as Nelson Marlborough Health/Nelson Marlborough DHB) has staff and services spread out across Te Tauihu (the regions situated at the top of the South Island of New Zealand) and is the main funder and provider of health services to approximately 160,000 people across the Nelson, Tasman, and Marlborough regions.
Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough employs more than 3,000 staff across:
- Two main hospitals – Nelson Hospital and Wairau Hospital (Blenheim)
- Two smaller hospitals – Murchison Hospital (rural) and Alexandra Hospital (older persons and mental health)
- Four community health hubs – Marlborough, Richmond, Motueka and Golden Bay
- Live Life Disability Support – services supporting 200 people in more than 50 suburban homes across Te Tauihu
- Nikau Hauora Hub (community mental health service)
They also work closely with their primary care partners – Nelson Bays PHO and Marlborough PHO and local Māori health provider Te Piki Oranga.
A Modern Intranet for a complex health organisation
When Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough approached Stratos as an Intranet implementation partner, they were looking to build a modern, cloud-hosted Intranet platform that could help them to not only connect their people with the tools and information they need to do their jobs but could also help them bring the organisation together in a social and cultural sense.
Having utilised a legacy on-premise Intranet solution for the past 10 years, the organisation needed a new solution:
- Fit for modern use with equitable Intranet access for all staff throughout the region
- User-friendly with straightforward access to the organisation’s Policies, Procedures and Guidelines
- Easy to share news and keep staff updated with initiatives happening across the organisation
- Maintainable within the projects tight budget constraints
The cornerstone activity for the new Intranet was to ensure that all Policies, Procedures and Guidelines, could be made available and accessible regardless of site or people location. It needed to be accessible by staff on mobile, off-site by health partners, and available should servers need to be shut down i.e., in the event of a cyberattack. Looking to build an Intranet that met the needs of their people, Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough were eager to create a user-friendly Intranet that could empower their teams to focus on the work they do best: improving patient outcomes.
A Modern Intranet for a complex health organisation
Aware of the complexities of the health IT environment, Stratos were engaged to help Te Whatu Ora Nelson Marlborough migrate to, implement, and integrate a SharePoint Online intranet. Given the organisation were already familiar with other Microsoft 365 products, choosing SharePoint Online made sense because it leveraged their existing cloud infrastructure and licensing. However, it wasn’t the sole reason they chose SharePoint.
SharePoint offered the organisation a flexible and reliable platform that would allow them to continuously meet the needs of their people with:
- Content creation, publishing, and lifecycle management
- Secure access to policies, procedures and guidelines
- Advanced search features to support people directory requirements
- Modern responsive designs and layouts to create a great experience on any device
- Integration with Office 365 productivity tools
- Better cyber security features to protect systems and information.
- Stratos played both a consulting and development role in this project, helping the Nelson
Marlborough team to identify and prioritise the best course of action to make the organisation’s Intranet migration to Microsoft work. With the Policies, Procedures and Guidelines being the cornerstone of the project, Stratos were able to develop complex Power Automate workflows to support the management of Policies, Procedures and Guidelines through their lifecycle and review process.
To make the people directory work well, ensuring data integrity and implementing measures to maintain integrity into the future, was a key priority. Highly specialised in Microsoft Intranet migrations, the Stratos team knew that to make the people directory work both in the short and long term, the organisation needed to better manage the data inputs. Stratos helped the team identify and implement better data hygiene practices to ensure that both the existing, and future data were of high quality and the migration was a success. They also developed a custom people directory search and profile display cards to improve the functionality of the people directory.
“Stratos are a small team, and they are really customer focused,” says Marama Handcock-Scott, Digital Solutions Specialist – SharePoint at Nelson Marlborough. “They really listen to what you're after and talk through all the possible solutions without telling you what you should do.”
An organisation enabled, empowered, and well-connected
Staff across the region have expressed their gratitude for the new system.
Marama says, “We’ve had great feedback from people. The Intranet has a great modern look and feel, is very responsive, and people are well-engaged using the new tools (My Links, Yammer etc)!”
While the organisation continues to move its existing content over, Marama explains that the team is looking forward to making further improvements using the SharePoint system and leaning on Stratos for help as needed.
“Stratos are fantastic partners to work with,” says Marama. “Even though the initial Intranet project is finished, they are still only ever a quick email or phone call away when we need to discuss possible developments or integrations with other Microsoft 365 applications, or if we just need a quick bit of advice or direction.”
Stratos are experts in delivering Intranet solutions that empower and enable people. For more information on what we do and how we can match your organisation with the right solution, get in touch or learn more about us.
