NSW Health
Rapid fibre rollout a shot in the arm for COVID response
Overview
The COVID-19 pandemic was a health, social, and economic crisis of enormous magnitude. In managing the public health response in New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s most populous state, NSW Health required an all-encompassing collaborative response from health agencies and its vendors such as Vocus.
How Vocus helped support NSW Health's COVID-19 public vaccination program
The COVID-19 public vaccination campaign was the largest and most complex ever implemented in Australia. To support the health response in NSW, state and local government health agencies, together with vendors such as Vocus, came together to enable a public vaccination program at a pace and scale that’s never been seen before.
The challenge
One of the many important tasks required was to establish new fibre networks at sites where there was no existing fibre network to connect IT systems to these clinics. For NSW Health, that meant working with the right partners to find a way to get vital connectivity in place wherever and whenever it was needed – at testing centres and airports, vaccination centres, shopping centres, hotel quarantine and more.
The challenge required creative thinking and agility to get the necessary connectivity up and running.
The solution
Vocus provided either the primary or secondary network service for some of NSW Health’s vaccination clinics in Western Sydney, South-West Sydney, Illawarra Shoalhaven and the Mid-North Coast.
While most vaccination centres could run on a 1 gigabit (G) link, the largest required dual 10G links. This was because of the volume of consumers expected and the need to connect the site with pathology laboratories.
Vocus also worked closely with other network vendors to ensure the primary and secondary networks didn't share any common infrastructure such as exchange, cabling, pits or ducting. This ensured that if the primary network failed, the secondary one would provide guaranteed back-up.
Vocus was able to work with NSW Health to source, procure, contract and deliver services in days and weeks. This was achieved by prioritising work, having engineers available at nights and weekends, and by being flexible with business-as-usual processes. In some instances, this meant putting in temporary solutions to meet hard deadlines, and to then came back to deliver permanent solutions at minimal extra cost.
Outcome
Vocus and other vendors helped support NSW Health as well as state and local health organisations to successfully implement a vaccination administration management solution that enabled the mass vaccination of NSW citizens.
Vocus is proud to have played a role in supporting the NSW Government’s pandemic response and helping to keep the people of NSW safe through timely, mass vaccination.
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