North Bristol NHS Trust has awarded a contract to Alcatel-Lucent to provide it with an advanced IP telephony system.
The project is being carried out by South West Communications Group. The £2m investment will also provide an advanced communications infrastructure for a new ‘super hospital’ in Bristol, scheduled for completion in 2013.
The deployment includes innovative speech-enabled, automated directory technology alongside advanced call centre and unified communications applications. The tools will support 9,000 staff across the trust’s various sites.
In addition, staff and patients will be able to interact more closely through patient paging services and multiparty video conferencing.
Some 600 employees will be provided with Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniTouch 8600 My Instant Communicator unified communications solution, giving them access to voice mail, text messages, faxes, emails, instant messaging, voice and video conferences from a single mobile device.
Martin Bell, director of information management and technology at North Bristol NHS Trust, said: “Communication is vital to healthcare organisations – from crash call access to first point of patient contact, staff must communicate effectively and rapidly regardless of their location, which had previously been a challenge for a trust of our size.”
Bell added that the new communications network will underpin services to be provided from the new hospital, “this future-proof, robust platform will support our growth and enable the continued evolution of our patient services.”
“Ensuring staff productivity and accessibility has always proved challenging for healthcare organisations, given the ever-mobile nature of their day-to-day operations,” said David Parker, vice president for Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise activities in the UK and Ireland.
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