Unified comms in good health

After the merger of Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2018, the organisation spanned across five sites with separate telephony systems. UHDB has invested in upgrading its disparate legacy telephony systems with a more resilient and stable UC telephony service that will unify the user experience for all staff and support collaboration across its sites and the community.

Driven by the NHS Internet First Policy, the new Cisco Powered sovereign UC telephony service, delivered from the Cinos Cloud will provide the Trust with a secure and reliable service that delivers the flexibility and robustness needed to adopt new hybrid working practices. A secure Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) service will also be implemented, allowing the Trust to more accurately forecast call expenditures whilst future-proofing its telephony infrastructure in readiness for the pending retirement of PTSN networks.

The Trust, which provides acute treatment and care for over a million people in South Derbyshire and East Staffordshire, required a cloud-based platform. One that allows it quickly to scale services as needed and gives easy access to staff working at its five hospitals, community sites, non-trust community sites and to healthcare teams working out in the community.

Simon Reynolds, Head of Voice Services at UHDB says: “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 skill set 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.”

Since COVID, the Trust has experienced a growing workforce requiring agile and home working. Simon explains: “The Trust has over 14,500 staff, with around 9000 telephony users. We need to provide our agile workforce with the capability of maintaining access and making and receiving calls, regardless of where they’re based, whether it is across sites or another remote location. The new cloud-based telephony platform will allow our staff to easily communicate with each other without getting caught up in the busy switchboard service. We also want to ensure that whatever system we adopted had some level of integration with Microsoft Teams, because that's the platform that everyone uses on a day-to-day basis.”

The new switchboard solution will provide the Trust with a robust solution that will enable both hospital switchboards to support each other, if and when the need arises. With always-on communication a critical requirement, Cinos will also deploy an emergency telephone solution at both of the Trust’s acute sites to ensure further resilience. This will guarantee that key handsets within the Trust, used for raising emergencies and summoning crash teams, remain operational even in the event of local outages – with increased resilience at the community sites through dedicated Cinos SIP connectivity.

Dan Worman, Executive Director of Cinos, says: “Communications in the NHS is changing for the better. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Trusts like UHDB make significant strides in modernising their legacy telephony systems to ensure their workforces are supported by a reliable and resilient unified communication platform for anytime, anywhere communication. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the Trust and supporting them on their journey.”

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.