Telefónica creates 20 jobs in Belfast with NI health contract – Business Plus

Telefónica Tech UK & Ireland has announced the creation of 20 new local jobs in relation to a major five-year health contract in Northern Ireland.

The Spanish firm, which employs more than 330 people in its regional Belfast headquarters, is currently delivering an IT managed services contract to help support ‘Encompass’, the health and social care programme that is aiming to digitise care records in Northern Ireland.

Telefónica will provide key IT hosting and managed services for the programme, including the building and managing of all back-end IT infrastructure and the hosting of Epic, a health record management software.

Currently, two of five Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland have gone live with digitised records — the South Eastern Trust in November 2023 and the Belfast Trust earlier this month. The Belfast Trust is the largest of its kind in the UK, servicing some 340,000 social and healthcare clients.

The Encompass programme is expected to be rolled out to all Trusts over a two-year period.

Ellen Dickson, VP at Telefónica, believes that the programme is a “transformational project” from both a medical and operational point of view, with Northern Ireland becoming the first part of the UK where “patients have a single integrated care record”.

“It is a highly complex project and critical to the health and wellbeing of service users in Northern Ireland. It will require the highest levels of service to support the approximately 70,000 staff members who will use the system once it is implemented across all the Trusts.

“We are very proud to contribute to its implementation in the South Eastern Health & Social Care Trust, and most recently in the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust, the largest Trust of its kind in the UK,” she said.

Telefónica has a dedicated team for enterprise health services and has worked with similar health trusts before, including the Cambridge University Hospitals Trust.

Dr Dermot Hughes of the Encompass programme added: “Telefónica Tech have contributed significantly to the successful implementation of the Epic Platform in Northern Ireland.

“Their dedicated Healthcare focused team have brought experience and a collegiate partnership to the encompass programme. They have grown their Belfast based workforce and have done so by opening opportunities to all.”

In April Telefónica won the technology infrastructure contract for the national children’s hospital in Dublin.

(Pic: Cristina Arias/Cover/Getty Images)