"It's about delivering even more mobile services to a mobile workforce. We've got a more dispersed workforce, and while that has offered us some great opportunities, it has been hard for us to create collaboration, and for our staff to get in touch with experts in [particular subjects]. Next on the agenda is that we're really trying to get a collaboration suite in place, and that's leveraging all of the things we've got in play."

Over at St Vincent's and Mater Hospitals' Roffe has started implementing tablets at the health service's public hospital -- primarily for viewing patient scans, records and other data -- and echoes this sentiment.

The hospital's public ward uses eight wireless laptops and 14 fixed desktops for entering information into a patient's electronic record, a task that is carried out by junior doctors and requires a keyboard.

"Senior doctors just want to view the information; that's where tablets come in. The senior doctors view the data and then liaise with the junior doctors about changing or entering information on the laptops," he says.

However, in the private wards the process is vastly different, Roffe says, where having only a small number of doctors mean nurses do most of the day-to-day work on their own dedicated terminal