University Hospital Coventry
The Project
Outdated legacy systems in NHS Trusts are common and are detrimental to both digital transformation and agile working.
University Hospital Coventry had several legacy telephone systems that were at the end of manufacturer support. These were provided as a service as part of the PFI agreement. The initial piece of work was to carry out a risk analysis on the current infrastructure and advise the Coventry & Rugby Hospital Company PLC on how it could best continue to deliver telephony services as part of the PFI agreement.
As part of the risk analysis, in order to provide a reliable and supportable telephone system, the PFI took the strategic decision to find specialist 3rd party maintenance services and initiate a replacement telephony project.
Background
University Hospital Coventry is managed under a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) agreement by The Coventry & Rugby Hospital Company PLC, with VINCI Facilities responsible for the delivery of the facilities and telecommunication infrastructure and ISS for the delivery of switchboard services. The Hospital is one of the UK’s largest teaching Hospitals with the University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust being responsible for managing two major hospitals in Coventry and Rugby, which between them serve a population of over 1 million people. Every year providing more than 800,000 episodes of care to patients from across Coventry, Warwickshire and beyond. The annual budget is circa £668 million, it has around 1,300 beds and 32 operating theatres across two hospitals and employs circa 9,000 staff.
Brief
4C Strategies were involved in the full project life cycle, from strategy, through procurement and project management and assurance activities.
Owing to the number of organisations involved and the nature of the environment, it was evident from the project initiation that a clear understanding of everyone’s differing responsibilities would need to be understood and that a common middle ground would at times have to be identified.
Thus, 4C Strategies first task was to work for The Coventry & Rugby Hospital Company PLC to develop a strategy. To achieve this objective, 4C Strategies met with a number of key stakeholders from the different organisations to gain a thorough understanding of the business requirements and the current ICT infrastructure. The optimum way forward identified would be to replace the existing legacy telephone systems with new supportable systems for the remaining duration of the PFI contract. This would be a hybrid approach of analogue technologies and IP technologies to increase resilience.
Subsequently, 4C Strategies worked alongside the different organisations to develop Invitation to Tender documentation for a closed procurement exercise comparing the technologies offered by the market leaders.
After managing the procurement through to contract award, 4C Strategies were retained to deliver a comprehensive implementation support service including Project Governance, Project Management, User Acceptance Testing and ongoing consultancy activities.
Outcome
The overall outcome of the project is that the site now has a new Unify OpenScape 4000 telephone solution supporting all users on the Coventry campus. The system is connected to resilient trunks and third-party applications for contact centre, voicemail, paging and call logging.
The main benefits of the investment are as follows:
- Telephony supported for the duration of the PFI contract
- Short term 3rd party maintenance agreement put in place, specialist in retaining out of support telephone systems.
- Upgrade of connect systems such as voicemail and switchboard services for security purposes.
- Increased resilience for critical services reliant on the telephony solution.
- Patient safety has improved as the site is no longer relying on ageing, unreliable and unsupported infrastructure for its communications.
- Opportunity to introduce new features to enhance the current customer service when required.
- Minimal disruption and risk in transitioning services.
- Cost of change minimised.
For further information call 01858 438938 or email nhs@4c.co.uk.
