The Project

Oxleas NHS provide a wide range of health and social care services in south east London, specialising in community health, mental health and learning disability services. With a workforce of around 3,500 people, the trust has over 125 sites in a variety of locations across the London Boroughs of Bexley, Bromley and Greenwich and into Kent.

The main driver from the client was that they needed a modern IP based telephone system which would allow staff to hot-desk between sites as well as work from home. By providing this functionality Oxleas management planned to reduce their building capacity where necessary and therefore enabling them to have a substantial cost saving along with a modern telephone system.

The scale of the project was an installation of the new system over around 40 buildings which vary from main hospital campus environments to medium and small-scale office blocks, hospital clinics and even prisons.

We also had to think of the environment where we were working as there were high risk areas such as 24-hour Emergency service response Systems, high risk patients in secure environments needing 24-hour support and managing hospital environments in HMP sites.

Conceptunet’s experience of running the existing Telephony Network provided a unique understanding of the operational nature of the Trust. This was both essential and critical in deploying the new technology and migrating the users from one well known and established environment to a new and unfamiliar facility. Our local engineers’ hands on experience with the users was invaluable in the migration and in tuning the system to be as effective as possible.

The Solution

Due to the size of the project, it was decided that we would need to implement the CM10,000 equipment product set to provide control over the estate. To ensure resilience and ‘fail-over’ there would need to be two CM10,000’s located at separate sites.

The initial sites were implemented to assist with the first hot-desking requirements of up to 1,000 phones. When available we then implemented the CM10,000’S at 24/7 sites. Rigorous testing was then done to ensure that there was failover between the new control units.

The Ericsson LG CM10K was new technology in the UK which presented a number of technical challenges as we pushed the existing LICP technology to its limits.

To facilitate the 3,500 users a new dedicated telephone network was built to add stability and allow the utilization of SIP trunks for the incoming traffic, leased lines and broadband to provide connectivity between sites.

Summary

Oxleas NHS now has a state of the art IP telephony network which will provide flexibility of staff throughout the estate at a significant cost saving to the NHS Trust and ultimately the tax payer.

“We have delivered one of the largest LG Ericsson installations in the UK and have the experience and skillsets required to implement significant size projects. With our partners Pragma and LG Eriksson we have enhanced our portfolio into new markets providing new and exciting opportunities.”
Dan Taylor, Conceptunet MD