Introduction

West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust provides acute healthcare services to a core catchment population of approximately half a million people living in west Hertfordshire and the surrounding area. The trust also provides a range of more specialist services to a wider population, serving residents of North London, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and East Hertfordshire, and sees nearly a million patients each year.

The Problem

West Herts NHS needed to prolong the service of life of their ISDX systems and expand capacity and enhance functionality for at least three years. Timescales were tight as the customer wanted to have all in place by March at the latest. The sites were Watford General Hospital, an acute District General Hospital situated on Vicarage Road, Watford, Hertfordshire and St Albans City Hospital, an acute District General Hospital in St. Albans. Both sites within the trust were legacy ISDN running software Release 9.1. They had two major concerns; first that the system was end of life and secondly the sites were short of capacity in order the deliver any increase in services, and the option of replacing the system quickly was economically and operationally not possible.

The Solution

We were contacted via the Trust Telecom Consultants DXP to provide upgrades and expansions to these two of the Trust’s hospitals.

Our responsibility was to survey and audit the existing systems set up on each site and perform an upgrade from Release 10 to Release 15, and Upgrades to enable SIP and UC to be implemented at each site prior to Covid Lockdown. As part of the project we facilitated training for the Trust’s on site engineer Guy Rolph to have training on the current latest release and SIP/UC integration at the Atos facility at Beeston. Due to the nature of the site, we followed the methodology document embed we use for Blue light, MOD and Airports.

Our engineers visited each site and took a copy of the latest back up and verify prior to taking any other action; the upgrades were both timed to meet customers’ schedules, and a back out plan agreed should there be a problem that our engineers could not resolve with the spare systems they had access to on site.

The Result

Both sites were upgraded to Release 15 and additional capacity to 3996 extensions from 3100, and with a three-year support package in place the Trust were able to have manufactured supported systems once more, an upgrade path to Openscape via SIP and we extended life by five years.