North Bristol NHS Trust upgrades its telecoms infrastructure

North Bristol NHS Trust has begun an upgrade to its telecoms infrastructure with a suite of Alcatel-Lucent products as part of a project to build a new £500m hospital on its Southmead site.

The Trust is the fifth largest healthcare trust in England with 9,000 staff, 1,300 beds and an annual turnover of approximately £450m.

"When I started at North Bristol NHS Trust about six years ago, there had been years of underinvestment," said Martin Bell, director of assurance, information and technology for North Bristol NHS Trust.

"We now have time to make this hospital a technology-led, information-led facility," he added.

Currently, the Trust has switchboard equipment in the back end that has been in place for 35 years, and most employees have very basic telephones with minimal functionality.

South West Communications Group was selected as the Trust's integrator and is migrating 7,500 phone extensions from the old system. The new system will have a capability for 10,000 extensions and have improved functionality, such as direct dial for patients.

Alcatel Lucent's OmniPCX Enterprise IP communications platform has been implemented to encourage staff collaboration, and will allow employees to interact through a patient paging service, multi-party video-conferencing and speech-enabled directory services.

Six hundred employees will also be equipped with Alcatel-Lucent's OmniTouch 8600 My Instant Communicator multi-media desktop and mobility solution, which will give staff access to voicemail, text messages, faxes, emails, instant messaging and video-conferencing from a single device.

"Around 10 per cent of our workforce is increasingly mobile; not just mobile within the site, but mobile across a whole region," explained Bell.

The Trust is also aiming to have approximately 90 per cent of its patient records electronically stored by 2012.