Credit: Raysonho/Open Grid Scheduler/Grid Engine/CC0

NHS Wales has agreed a nationwide deal that will give its 100,000-plus staff access to Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of cloud-hosted tools.

The arrangement covers a range of familiar applications such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, and Yammer. All programs will be offered to employees across multiple computing devices, including smartphones and tablets. 

The deal, which was signed with Microsoft reseller partner Trustmarque, also includes a nationwide upgrade to the Windows 10 E5 operating system.

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Andrew Griffiths, Director of NHS Wales Informatics Service, said: “This new national agreement is part of our commitment to refresh NHS Wales IT infrastructure and ensure it supports the transformational changes taking place across health and social care. It moves our digital estate away from locally managed services and into cloud-based services, delivering efficiencies and economies of scale.”

Griffiths added that moving to the updated OS – which includes a range of security tools, including the Microsoft Defender advanced threat protection offering – will be of particular benefit.

“It’s essential that NHS Wales has secure systems that health staff and patients trust and this agreement will help achieve that,” he said. “It will increase resilience and mean our services are running on the most up-to-date operating system at all times.”