According to a statement, the company will be unifying several separate telephony systems, spanning across five sites. The aim of this is to provide a “more resilient and stable UC telephony service that will unify the user experience for all staff, and support collaboration across its sites and the community.”
The statement continued: “Driven by the NHS Internet First Policy, the new Cisco Powered sovereign UC telephony service - delivered from the Cinos Cloud - will provide the Trust with a secure and reliable service. [This will] deliver the flexibility and robustness needed to adopt new hybrid working practices.
“A secure session initiation protocol [SIP] service will also be implemented, allowing the Trust to more accurately forecast call expenditures whilst future-proofing its telephony infrastructure in readiness for the pending retirement of PSTN networks.”
The Trust provides acute treatment and care for over a million people in South Derbyshire and East Staffordshire. It employs over 14,500 staff - including around 9,000 telephony users -, requiring “agile and home working.”
Head of voice services at UHDB, Simon Reynolds, said: “Telephony is a key service in an acute clinical environment, and we needed to future-proof and maintain the viability of stable telephony platform for our service users and our patients. Additionally, the required skill set to maintain such an old system has become harder to find.
“It has become a fundamental need for the Trust to provide a standardised platform and a way of seamlessly communicating internally across all sites. In addition, the Trust is looking at being cost-efficient with maintenance contracts and other services.
“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.”
Roll-out is currently underway at Royal Derby Hospital. It is anticipated that the entire Trust will be incorporated onto the new UC platform by the end of the year.
