Leicester's university hospitals have taken on an IP telephony system to maintain phone services during a major renovation project.

The system will allow 11,500 hospital staff to get access to patient records wherever they are within the building and allow them to hot desk while keeping a single contact number.

Once the Avaya system is installed, clinicians in the trust will use wireless handsets allowing them to be contacted wherever they are within the trust's three hospitals and will have to handle 24 million calls per year.

The hospitals needed to update their non-IP telephony system which were about 20 years old, says Bill Remmer, the assistant director of IT at the Leicester.

'We also wanted to improve our capabilities, and the new system will enable us to deliver a better quality of service to our patients,' he said.

'For instance, patients calling will be put through to a doctor either straightaway or faster than before without operators having to call around to locate a particular doctor and this can really make a difference to a patient’s opinion of the hospital and its level of care.'

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