Epson & St. Helier University Hospital Trust
The Client
Epsom and St. Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust provides a range of medical services to approximately 420,000 people living across southwest London and northeast Surrey. In addition, they provide more specialist services, in particular renal and neonatal intensive care, to a wider area, covering parts of Sussex and Hampshire.
The Trust serves an area that is rich in diversity, with a mix of urban and rural areas, and differing levels of quality of life. It covers some of the most prosperous postcodes in the country, as well as some poorer areas. The Trust employs approximately 4,800 staff across its hospitals and is supported by over 440 volunteers.
The Requirement
Epson and St. Helier NHS Trust is a long standing Aerelink Group customer, having had a relationship with Rapier Systems since 2001. In the early days of the relationship, the Trust bought mainly on price and had a mixed vendor infrastructure. Rapier introduced the Alcatel range of network hardware to the Trust and a long standing strategic partnership was born. Between 2001 and 2003, the entire network was migrated across to an Alcatel switching platform. This was performed in a structured manner, with the core being migrated first, then the outlying edges of the network to minimise disruption.
The Trust’s requirements have evolved over the life of the relationship, with increased speed requirements as applications evolve and advances in medical technology drive the requirement for greater data bandwidths. The emphasis for the Trust, as with all public sector organisations, is the drive for greater efficiency and best value from the communications budget available.
The Solution
In 2003, wireless links were introduced to the Trust, for the connection of geographically disparate sites as a low cost alternative to rented leased circuits and initially, a single wireless link was installed for data transfer between Epson and St. Helier Hospitals.
When the Department of Health introduced its PACS project for the transmission of medical imaging, it was identified that inter-site wide area communications needed a major overhaul, with bandwidths of up to 1 Gb/sec being required for the transmission of high resolution X-ray and MRI data. The cost put forward by the Trust’s Traditional Carrier partner were in the order of 250 thousand pounds for the installation and a significant ongoing yearly fee for a single gigabit circuit. Aerelink’s wireless alternative has proven to be significantly less, with a saving to the Trust of approximately 90% over a 5 year period. These huge savings and the proven resilience of the licensed wireless links deployed have encouraged the Trust to invest further in wireless technology, with Rapier’s solutions now being the preferred choice for inter-site connectivity.
In 2007, the Trust embarked on an ambitious Wi-Fi project, rolling out ‘blanket’ coverage across all sites. So far, approximately 500 access points have been deployed. The Wi-Fi network is used for a variety of applications, both for the Trust’s internal usage, such as connecting laptops and PDAs to enable ‘hot desking’ and mobile nursing stations and to connect medical equipment such as blood scanners, but also to enable a free patient access wireless network. This wireless network will also play a large part in the enabling of RFID asset tracking across the trust.
When the Trust wanted to migrate to a Voice Over IP (VOIP) platform to further drive cost savings, the Aerelink Group were again consulted. An Alcatel IP PBX was installed and integrated with the legacy Siemens telephone systems to provide IP telephone capability Trust wide. Once the Siemens contract is over, a full migration to IP Telephony will take place.
The Benefits
The Trust has a single point of contact, with a single strategic partner managing, designing and maintaining the entire Hospital Trust Infrastructure. Savings to the Trust are massive, with improved efficiency and better communications. Integration and sharing of services across multiple departments and applications is key, driving huge cost savings for the Trust. It’s simply a case of more, for less.
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