University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) partnered with Cinos to support its unified communications (UC) platform upgrade.
The leading systems integrator, Cinos, delivered a Cisco-powered UC telephony platform via its own Cinos Cloud service to bring the NHS Trust new hybrid working capabilities.
UHDB’s legacy telephony systems were upgraded to a “more resilient and stable” UC service, which provided a greater user experience and collaboration features.
A Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) service will also be introduced to increase call expenditure forecasting accuracy while simultaneously preparing for the impending PSTN switch-off.
Simon Reynolds, Head of Voice Services at UHDB, commented on the growing importance of hybrid working capabilities within the Trust: “The Trust has over 14,500 staff, with around 9000 telephony users.”
We need to provide our agile workforce with the capability of maintaining access and making and receiving calls, regardless of where they’re based, whether it is across sites or another remote location.”
“The new cloud-based telephony platform will allow our staff to easily communicate with each other without getting caught up in the busy switchboard service.”
“We also want to ensure that whatever system we adopted had some level of integration with Microsoft Teams because that’s the platform that everyone uses on a day-to-day basis.”
Reynolds explained how critical telephony services are within its “acute clinical environment” and the need to future-proof its telephony platform for both its patients and users.
UCaaS for UHDB
According to Cinos’ related press release, the NHS Trust had been looking for a cloud-based UC platform for its service, which covers more than one million people within the UK regions of South Derbyshire and East Staffordshire.
It wanted the platform to be able to scale services and offer staff easy access throughout its hospitals, trust and non-trust community sites, and healthcare teams working in the community.
From a financial perspective, Reynolds revealed that the Trust also wanted to ensure the cost-efficiency of its maintenance contracts and services.
The switchboard solution will allow hospital switchboards to assist each other as and when they need to.
“Always-on” communication is an essential feature, so Cinos will add an emergency telephone solution within the Trust’s acute sites.
Cinos says that this will guarantee that handsets for emergencies will remain operational even during local outages because of its dedicated SIP connectivity.
Dan Worman, Executive Director of Cinos, offered his view on the UC platform progress at UHDB:
Communications in the NHS is changing for the better.”
“Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Trusts like UHDB make significant strides in modernising their legacy telephony systems to ensure their workforces are supported by a reliable and resilient unified communication platform for anytime, anywhere communication.
“We look forward to continuing our partnership with the Trust and supporting them on their journey.”
In October last year, the Isle of Wight NHS Trust chose Cinos to provide it with a new telephony and unified communications solution.
UC Today’s David Dungay spoke to Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, at UC Expo 2023 in London about the Trust’s cloud migration journey.
