Meet Mari, our IT Manager. She’s looking for someone to join her team! 

A great opportunity to work within a small and passionate team working on a wide range of IT services for the benefit of all our teams at Strathcarron Hospice.

Mari is celebrating 20 years at Strathcarron Hospice. She’s worked in a number of roles, but been the helm of the IT transformation at Strathcarron over much of this period. She's adapted many technological changes and is now looking for an IT Support Technician.

During her time, the Hospice have also bought, designed and implemented many different systems, databases and website changes facilitating moving from manual to electronic transfers of information in all areas - our fundraising software, electronic point of sale systems for our shops and a full electronic patient records. All this has benefited the experience of care that patients, families and staff receive.

Mari says, “There was not a huge amount of IT equipment in the hospice in my early days and especially not in the clinical areas. The Hospice Administrator at that time could turn his hand to anything. He had built the server and ran that side of things. Admin staff had PCs with the old style monitors as they were cheaper. They now sell as vintage on ebay!

Working in a Pandemic was a huge challenge. Staff working from home had to have equipment so they could access files remotely. Equipment was difficult to get hold of, but luckily we had just taken delivery of our annual upgrade batch of PCs, so that made it easier.

We already had video conferencing facilities, but there were many training sessions supporting care homes, meetings which had to be held online and the internet we had in the hospice was slow and simply could not cope. We then had to work fast to add mobile data solutions and eventually upgrade to fibre, allowing us to have multiple video conferences simultaneously, without the day to day Hospice business being disturbed.

This has allowed us to move some of our non-patient systems to the cloud which also facilitates hybrid working. During COVID we also implemented Office 365 which allows us access to communication tools online. This was both useful at the time and is going forward. It was a busy time, but as challenging as it was, my Hospice colleagues, our NHS partners and external providers came together with a sense of purpose which was uplifting. Every difference we made was so gratifying.

The best part of my job is the variety and general 'busyness' – every day is different and every day I learn something new and have been allowed to develop myself and the services we provide. I have been lucky enough to have worked with amazingly talented, fun, supportive and compassionate people”.

Has Mari’s story inspired you? Would you like make a real difference across our Hopsice? If so, please apply now. More information on the job can be found under ‘Jobs’ on our website.