The background

South West Communications Group provides Devon Primary Care Trust with a unified voice and data system that has the flexibility to encompass its multi-site organisational structure and the growing NHS trend towards remote workers.

Devon Primary Care Trust works to improve health and develop better health and social care services for almost three-quarters of a million people in the Devon area. The Trust manages community hospitals and health centres and works with GPs, dentists, and pharmacies to ensure the population has the best and most appropriate service as close to their home as possible. It also commissions in-patient treatment, out-patient appointments and diagnostic tests at acute hospitals in Exeter, Plymouth, Torbay and north Devon.

The challenge

Devon Primary Care Trust’s former headquarters in Southernhay, Exeter, was being sold and the Trust was due to relocate to leased offices at County Hall, owned by Devon County Council.

While the Council had offered to provide the Trust with its telephone services through its Siemens iSDX system, the Trust was open to suggestions of other solutions that give it more autonomy and management control. The Trust needed a network that could support the growing trend towards more remote and home workers within its extensive workforce.

The Trust was also keen to update its data network as the existing one was managed by a third party which came with frustrating restrictions. The Trust wanted the autonomy to manage its own data network which was required to support voice as well as data traffic with the deployment of Internet protocol (IP) telephony services. It was also keen to take advantage of the cost savings that can be made by bringing the management of both networks in house.

The solution

South West Communications Group provided Devon Primary Care Trust with an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise communications system and and an Alcatel-Lucent data networking hardware infrastructure in a single solution that included the following:

• Local area network (LAN) infrastructure
• Wide area network (WAN) infrastructure
• Integrated voice & data network supporting IP telephony
• Centralised management
• Home working
• Unified communications
• Dual server technology for resilience
• A second back up telephony server for disaster recovery

Since the initial installation at County Hall and Newcourt House, the Trust has rolled out South West Communications Group’s telephony services to a number of its regional offices including 6 local hospitals.

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