NHS Fife

The situation

A GP practice isn’t a monolithic building with a front door and a back door. It’s a coordination point. Doctors and nurses move between treatment rooms, between practices across the health board area, between clinical roles and administrative space. They print referrals, test results, prescriptions and patient summaries. The technology assumption that printing happens at one desk in one room, plugged into one printer, doesn’t map onto how medicine actually works.

NHS Fife’s GP practices faced exactly this problem. General practitioners needed to print from multiple locations within their practice and across different practices within the health board. Printing only worked reliably in specific rooms where everyone knew the setup. Doctors working in other areas had to walk to those rooms or find workarounds, email to themselves, paper notes, improvised solutions that ate into clinical time.

James Mavor, Endpoint Manager for Digital and Information, identified the deeper issue: “The challenges we were facing that SCC helped us solve was GP print mobility. There is a big issue in the NHS with GPs not being able to print from room to room.” The problem wasn’t technical failure. It was technical constraint. The infrastructure wasn’t designed for how modern clinical teams actually moved through space.

What SCC did

SCC developed a GP Print Mobility Solution specifically for this workflow. The solution enabled GPs to print from any device in any room across any practice in the health board. This required rethinking authentication and routing. GPs needed to be able to swipe a card or log in wherever they were and have their print job find the nearest available printer, the one they were standing next to, not the one that was “theirs.”

The first iteration was piloted carefully. SCC worked with clinical staff to understand the failure cases: what happened when a GP moved between practices mid-morning? What if they were covering another site? What if they needed to print in a consultation room that hadn’t been set up before? Each scenario shaped the design.

Once the solution was validated, NHS Fife rolled it out across the board’s practices. This wasn’t a one-size-fits-all deployment. Practices had different room layouts, different printer types and different staffing patterns. SCC worked with each to get the solution working within their specific environment.

What changed

Friction disappeared. GPs stopped having to walk across the building to print. They stopped improvising workarounds. They stopped accepting printing delays as a normal part of their day. That meant less clinical time spent managing technology and more time spent with patients.

The health board also learned something about patient safety. Printing is not a neutral activity. When a GP can’t print easily, they’re more likely to carry patient information in their head, or on sticky notes, or in incomplete digital records. When printing is easy, the information flows properly. Reduced delays and workarounds meant improved patient care by removing technology friction at the point where it mattered most.

What the client learned

NHS Fife learned that problems that feel operational, “our printing doesn’t work well”, are often workflow problems, not IT problems. The constraint wasn’t printers. It was the assumption that printers would sit in fixed locations and users would come to them. Once SCC reframed the requirement as “GPs need to print where they are,” the solution became obvious. The learning wasn’t about print technology. It was about asking clinicians what they’re actually trying to do, then building IT around that reality.