Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – Indoor mobile network

Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) is a family of hospitals comprising Addenbrooke’s and The Rosie. Addenbrooke's Hospital is a large teaching hospital and research centre in Cambridge, located on the 140-acre shared Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The Rosie is a women’s hospital and the regional centre of excellence for maternity care. It has its own theatre suite, foetal assessment unit, ultrasound department and neonatal intensive care unit.

The trust caters to an estimated 2,200 outpatients,1,200 bed patients and 4,500 visitors a day, meaning that the availability of reliable and easy to access mobile connectivity is crucial.

Throughout the hospital, Wi-Fi connectivity suffered from not spots and patchy coverage, with a complete lack of Wi-Fi on level one due to the building design and layout. Aging Wi-Fi connectivity infrastructure was unable to provide the wireless coverage needed for staff, patients and visitors.

Challenges the hospitals faced included:

• the hospital contact centre regularly reported having to make numerous attempts using different methods to contact staff working in areas with poor connectivity
• ambulance bays suffered from poor connectivity, causing challenges when transferring patients from the ambulance to A&E department
• pagers and bleepers needed to be replaced with clinical communications applications, and mobile telephony, which required data connectivity coverage across the hospitals

To resolve their connectivity challenges the trust implemented a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) providing a 4G mobile connectivity network indoors. The DAS now provides 95% of the resilient wireless coverage at both Addenbrookes and the Rosie Hospitals, including areas previously inaccessible to Wi-Fi such as the basement of the hospital and ambulance bays.

This improved connectivity has benefited staff, patients and visitors with not only improved connectivity to access essential applications, services and to stay in touch, but with a range of new or improved services enabled by the connectivity. These include maintenance teams using mobile applications to complete tasks, rather than outdated pagers and a wayfinding application to guide patients and visitors around the hospitals.

The following pages contain a summary of the report content. The full report, including detailed technical appendices on the design of the solution is available on the FutureNHS collaboration platform (you will need a FutureNHS or NHSmail account to access it).

For an introduction to this topic see our Introduction to in-building mobile coverage.