Case Study: University Hospitals of North Staffordshire NHS Trust

Fit for the future

In 2003 the hospital was successful in its bid for a £370 million Private Finance Initiative development (PFI), including refurbishment of existing facilities, the introduction of major new facilities, and a new hospital currently under construction and fully operational by 2012.

The PFI project is part of the programme to modernise health services in North Staffordshire. Known as Fit for the Future, the project moves a range of health services into community settings and incorporates major building works as well as a step-change in technology, introducing leading edge communications networks and state of the art equipment to provide North Staffordshire with the most modern and advanced acute hospital services.  

In 2007, as part of the PFI programme, Kcom was selected to provide managed network services, cabling infrastructure and telecommunications expertise; a combination of hands-on technical support for systems operational issues as they arise, and working in partnership with both the Trust and its PFI partners to create new, better, faster and more cost-effective ways of doing things. With a contract term of 37 years this will be a long standing relationship.

Quality Time

Kcom is responsible for designing, implementing and managing a state of the art voice and data network for the City General and Haywood Hospital sites currently undergoing refurbishment and development. As new buildings and systems become operational, they will be incorporated within the managed service.

Kcom's network involvement falls into three areas. Firstly there is the design, integration and transition of the new network; secondly, the managed services element ensuring that the network is always operating at peak performance; the third area involves constantly looking to the future and exploring ways of evolving the network and services to reduce costs whilst raising efficiencies.

The input Kcom provides is both evolutionary and revolutionary, bringing old and refurbished buildings into the network, whilst preserving valued architectural features as well as helping to create a platform for the future. This means careful migration from legacy systems in some parts of the campus as well as running parallel systems in others until some future point in time.

To ensure that the complexities of the project never create hurdles for its continuous progression, and also to make absolutely sure that patient services are never interrupted, Kcom has a four-person team permanently onsite, managing and monitoring the existing data, voice network and full change control. The team undertakes project and pilot work, as well as fine tuning of the network, while the remote Kcom Network Operations Centre provides 24/7 cover for fault finding and fixing. In all, network services are provided for 5000 users, involving over 400 network devices.

If efficiencies facilitated via the network could shave just one minute off the average time involved in dealing with each patient, this would mean a saving of 600,000 minutes a year. That equates to 10,000 hours or, in other words, 1428 person-days.

In the world of acute healthcare, however, a high performance network is about much more than the time it saves, it is about the significant steps forward in the quality of care it facilitates; using technology to enable robust, reliable and accurate pathology procedures, data and image retrieval, and internal as well as external communications. The network makes it possible.  

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Making IT Better

"Kcom deliver a wireless network that is fit for purpose and, to University Hospital that means being fit for the future. Their on-site surveys are impeccable and in-depth, taking account of the limitations of listed buildings as well as adopting an innovative approach to make the most of the almost unlimited potential of facilities still in development."
Jeff Harnett, UHNS IT Programme Manager

As an example, the Trust's Order Communications Project is the next phase of the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) Programme. This project enables pathologists, radiologists and therapists to take wireless PC trolleys and laptops to patients' bedsides, and on ward rounds. Diagnostic investigations, such as blood samples and X-rays, can be ordered from the bedside; nothing is hand-written reducing the risk of human error, thus improving quality of care and safety, and reducing any clinical risks.

The high bandwidth network also makes it possible to view X-rays, MRI scans and CT scans at the bedside. Picture Archiving Services (PACS) offering instant digital images, will be viewable anywhere on the Trust network, both hard-wired and wirelessly. Where X-rays once took hours to produce, they are now instant; stored electronically so there is no need for bulky plates, negatives and photographs and no need to wander off to retrieve the images at some distant storage facility. Time, quality, reliability and accuracy are once again key features of networked facilitated hospital procedures

Healthy Relationships

Kcom's managed services fit the bill for University Hospital, providing predictable, long term costs (and considerable cost-savings) through a solid campus infrastructure, wireless and wired, providing a basis for innovation and improvements in patient care. Already, files are retrieved faster and diagnostics performed quicker. The Kcom team enables the Trust's own technology experts to focus on constant improvement and innovation, rather than the day to day network operations. Currently in development are major leaps forward like video conferencing which would provide video links from operating theatres to lecture rooms, directory services, and RFID tagging to manage and track hospital equipment such as infusion devices and beds.

Working partnerships such as this help deliver improvements for the NHS, knowing that it is deriving maximum value for money at all times. Kcom's services are subject to regular benchmarking to provide proof that they are best in class, best practice and the best the NHS in North Staffordshire can do for its patient community.