International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on 12 May, the birthday of Florence Nightingale. This year, Imprivata UK marked the day at Queens Hospital Burton, part of University Hospitals of Derby and Burton, a long time user of Imprivata technology.

A perfect opportunity for us to say ‘thank you’ and show our appreciation for the hard work of nurses, we joined the pop-up event at Queens Hospital. We came armed with goodies including mobile phone power banks and ‘moptop’ pens, which are so popular they are fast becoming collectors’ items.

Andy E, former Director of Connected Nottinghamshire, the first chief cyber security officer (CCSO) for a system STP and, most recently, the first CCSO for an ICS at Birmingham and Solihull, argues that without facing up to the reality of the risks inherent in the legacy systems used in the NHS, we cannot hope to protect ourselves from attacks and build resilience into our processes. The situation may be critical but there are tangible actions we can take today to start to address vulnerabilities head on.

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHSFT has gone live with a clinical desktop using the combination of Citrix and IGEL, with an Imprivata layer to provide single sign on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). The combined solution, called ‘Follow Me Desktop’, has been rolled out across both the Trust’s hospitals and its maternity unit, covering 45 inpatient wards and 22 operating theatres.

We recently spoke with Andrew Harrison, principal product manager, international, at Imprivata about the future of EPRs. Andrew shared some key examples of best practices and gave his own insights into secure access for clinicians.

Balancing security and usability in EPR adoption

Due to the sensitive – and therefore valuable – patient data they hold, healthcare organisations have long been a highly attractive target of external security threats. That vulnerability was historically highlighted during the 2024 breach of Change Healthcare, the largest data breach ever reported. As a result of the attack, the protected health information of some 190 million individuals was compromised, and business operations were severely hampered.

As a CISO, there are moments when you realize you’ve been asking the wrong question. For months, I’d been personally trying to solve for device sprawl, authentication fatigue, and mobile device loss in a rapidly shifting hybrid work environment for one of my projects. My team was burned out managing mobile devices manually or with disparate tools. Worse yet, we lacked the visibility we needed to properly assess our security risk.

Martin Knight, International Sales Manager for Privileged Access Management at Imprivata, reflects on the results of a recent survey by HTN on current NHS practices around managing third-party access and how cyber tools such as privileged access management solutions can help keep the NHS supply chain secure.