Princess Alexandra’s 10,000-asset service transformation

Hospitals move at the pace of medicine, but the technology behind the scenes doesn't always keep up. At Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, an ICT team supporting more than 4,500 staff has been closing that gap. IT support used to run largely through phone calls, with agents fielding roughly 3,500 requests a month and no formal register to track the trust's aging equipment.

Freshservice gave the ICT team a self-service portal, automated ticket routing, and a real asset register, then helped the trust onboard 40 to 50 new agents through the go-live of a major new patient records system.

Monthly help desk calls have dropped by more than 70%, average ticket resolution time is down 48 hours, and nearly 10,000 IT assets are now tracked centrally. 

"Freshservice has been transformational," says Tony Saward, ICT service delivery manager at PAHT. "It has allowed us to get the best out of the equipment and technology that we have."

The company

Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT) provides general, acute, outpatient, and diagnostic care across its hospital sites in the UK, employing more than 4,500 staff. 

The challenge

Healthcare technology moves quickly on the clinical side — new diagnostic tools and treatment systems arrive at a pace that back-office IT often struggles to match. That was true for Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust's ICT team, which for years ran on a legacy tool, Sostenuto from Sunrise Software, that had grown organically and never quite delivered what the department needed.

Requests came in mostly by phone, with agents fielding roughly 3,500 calls a month and typing details into the system by hand on the caller's behalf. With no formal asset register, the team had no reliable way to see who was using its nearly 10,000 IT devices, where they were located, or when they were due for a refresh.

That made it harder to route the right ticket to the right team quickly, harder to plan replacements, and harder for a growing department to keep pace with a hospital that depends on its equipment working as smoothly as its clinical technology. PAHT needed a solution that would move service requests off the phone and onto a self-service system, while giving the ICT team full visibility into the equipment it was responsible for.  

The solution

When PAHT went looking for a replacement, the team evaluated three ITSM tools, two cloud-based and one on-premise. Freshservice stood out for its alignment with ITIL best practices, its asset management capabilities, and its ease of use. 

Freshservice's asset management gave the ICT team its first formal register, tracking close to 10,000 devices along with their location, age, and condition, so staff can decide when to refresh a device rather than replace it outright.

Freshservice, powered by AWS, gave the trust the scalable ticketing and workflow foundation to standardize how requests move through the system, automating routing so issues reach the right team without manual triage. That operational management centers on end-user computing rather than network infrastructure, which sits with a separate cybersecurity team.

When PAHT rolled out a major new patient records system, Oracle Health, in November 2024, the ICT team used Freshservice to bring on 40 to 50 new agents for the go-live, giving staff a way to raise tickets rather than call in issues one by one.

The team has also built an internal knowledge base for troubleshooting and begun linking Freshservice to other systems through marketplace integrations, such as one that sends a code to a self-service locker so staff can swap out a broken mouse or keyboard without waiting on a technician.

“The mere act of automation forces you to make sure you get the process right in the first place, because you don't want to automate just rubbish,” says Saward.

Impact 

Since implementing Freshservice, monthly help desk calls have dropped from roughly 3,500 to about 1,000 since requests moved onto the self-service portal, with automated routing sending tickets straight to the right team.

Average ticket resolution time is down 48 hours. The ICT team now tracks close to 10,000 devices in a single asset register, up from no formal record at all, and agent capacity has grown alongside demand, from about 90 licenses to 150.

Says Saward, "What we're trying to do, and what Freshservice is helping us do, is allow us as an IT department to provide the most efficient service to our clinicians, so our clinicians can treat more patients.”