The University Hospitals of North Midlands (UHNM) comprises of Royal Stoke University Hospital, County Hospital in Stafford, and Staffordshire Children’s Hospital at Royal Stoke.
A prominent developer at the Trust had left leaving over 2 million lines of unsupported PHP code spread across numerous inter-related applications. The trust needed someone who could quickly become proficient at maintaining the code, develop new functionality, and offer advice on redeveloping the systems to their in-house standards.
This involved:
• Supporting the applications for the 8,000 Stoke Hospital users. This later became 12,000 when the Hospital merged with Stafford Hospital.
• Developing and maintaining a Virtual Machine to emulate the live system in isolation. This was then used for development and testing of changes to the live system.
• Making database updates to the live database to keep the system up to date and functional.
• Implement an authorisation system which integrates with the Hospital’s MS Active Directory structure.
• Developing a backup solution for the code and data, and preparing for disaster recovery.
• Responding to helpdesk requests, liaising with users to identify problems and provide solutions either by code changes, database updates or training.
• Redeveloping the import process for Staff-In-Post data from HR systems. This was a new PHP/MySQL application to parse the incoming data, and load it into the live database. I used jQuery UI to add a user friendly front end.
• Active Directory group maintenance. The BI team needed a way of easily managing users Active Directory groups. I wrote a suitable utility in C# .NET.
• Supplies & Procurement required management reports and graphs. I coded some pages using PHP/MySQL, jQuery and Google Charts.
• Other ad-hoc development such as developing Report Builder 3.0 reports for SQL Server.