University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) is planning to modernise its unified communications (UC) platform in partnership with systems integrator Cinos.
The roll out of the project is already underway at Royal Derby Hospital, with plans to incorporate the entire trust onto the UC platform by the end of the year.
This is the latest step in the trust’s consolidation of digital systems following the merger of its two predecessors – which had separate telephony systems for five sites – in 2018.
It is planning to use the Cisco Powered sovereign UC telephony service based on the secure session initiation protocol (SIP), which will enable both hospital switchboards to support each other as the need arises.
Cinos will also deploy an emergency telephone solution using its SIP connectivity at both of the trust’s acute sites to provide further resilience. This is intended to guarantee that key handsets, used for raising emergencies and summoning crash teams, remain operational even in the event of local outages.
Future-proofing a necessity
Simon Reynolds, head of voice services at UHDB, said: “Telephony is a key service in an acute clinical environment, and we needed to future-proof and maintain the viability of stable telephony platform for our service users and our patients. Additionally, the required skillset to maintain such an old system has become harder to find.
“It has become a fundamental need for the trust to provide a standardised platform and a way of seamlessly communicating internally across all sites. In addition, the trust is looking at being cost-efficient with maintenance contracts and other services.”
Cinos added that the platform will make the trust ready for the pending retirement of PSTN networks, support hybrid working and help it to accurately forecast its spending on telephone calls.
