Alister Cresswell, project manager at the Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: “Due to the nature of our clinical work at Papworth, the ability to send medical emergency messages to a team, wherever they are in the new hospital is critical. We looked at other technical options and concluded that paging gives us the best balance of speed, accuracy and cost-effectiveness and the Swissphone solution meets these needs perfectly.”
Graeme Hull, head of international sales at Swissphone commented: “Recent press reports have indicated that the NHS has been directed to move away from paging in the coming years. The award of these contracts from some of the biggest and most prestigious Healthcare providers in the world, demonstrate that the staff on the ground, who actually have the responsibility of providing emergency alerting solutions for NHS Staff, understand that paging is still the most efficient and cost-effective way of delivering messages in life-critical situations.”
Both Swissphone and Critical Messaging Association of Europe (which it is a member of) believe that there is currently a significant amount of misinformation regarding some of the alternatives to paging in the market.
Harald Pfurtscheller, Swissphone’s CTO said: “It is simply incorrect to state that pagers can only perform one task. Our devices can receive both speech and data messages, and store both types of message within the device for later review. In addition, they can alert the user with unique tones, vibration, colour coded LEDs or a combination of these. Our systems can integrate to clinical monitoring to provide real-time updates on patient information and fully integrate to the hospital telephone and IT-systems to allow messages to be generated from internal extensions and PC-workstations. In addition, some of our devices allow a user to acknowledge receipt of an emergency message and to inform the operator that they are responding to the call. On the system side, we provide dedicated operator terminals that allow medical emergency calls to be dispatched securely and with priority over other calls. This means that in an emergency, we can get a call to response team members in seconds, wherever they are in the hospital.”
Angelo Saccoccia, CEO of Swissphone said: “…We understand that new technology can bring benefits which is why we continually invest in enhancing existing solutions and developing new ones. However, our customers in the NHS realise that a substitution with new technology is not always appropriate, particularly in demanding environments such as NHS wards and clinical areas. Devices need to work for seven years or more, which is a challenge when they get dropped and can be easily damaged. Therefore, many customers choose Swissphone pagers, with their robust construction and water-proof certification. This reduces repair costs and in conjunction with the relatively low cost of providing 100 per cent site coverage, makes our healthcare solutions an effective and economical way of addressing critical messaging requirements.”
