Use of Terminal Services
2 – Use of terminal services
The use of terminal services for NHS-HE connectivity has been seen as a good way forward for a number of years. One of the first outputs from the NHS-HE Forum was Andrew Cormack’s discussion paper agreed with the NHS at the time.
There are now good examples of where this has been adopted for Universities delivering services such as:
University of Bristol and Clinical Academies at NHS Trusts
Medical students at the University of Bristol spend years 3 -5 of their study at Clinical Academies, based across a number of NHS hospitals in the south west region. This case study describes how the students have been provided with a remote service (Microsoft's Remote Desktop) to enable access to all of their centrally provided electronic resources. It describes how the current service has migrated from being Citrix-based and using fixed point-to-point private circuits, to a service which utilises the NHS-HE gateway (N3 JANET Gateway).
University of Dundee and NHS Tayside & beyond
The University of Dundee has used a Citrix XenApp solution to allow University staff and students working at NHS sites to access University IT services and on-line learning and teaching content. This overcomes the current practice of stringent internet filtering and some reliance on IE6 in the NHS sites they work with.
In addition it recognised that terminal services are used extensively in the corporate world and internationally. A member of the group was able to offer a detailed description of an international set-up that would potentially serve a linked overseas campus for instance:
