About the trust

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.

The campus also contains other health and health research sites, including some where the trust have shared occupancy. This provides emergency, surgical, and medical care as well as being a regional centre of excellence for specialist services such as organ transplantation, neurosciences, paediatrics and genetics.

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.

Level 1 is where most of the estates and facilities teams are based and the site security offices were located. The lack of Wi-Fi connectivity had a significant impact on staff’s ability to do their jobs and meant that staff in these areas were reliant on paging services and push-to-talk (PTT) radios to communicate.

Public and guest internet connectivity was provided via NHS Wi-Fi, which had a registration and email authentication process that users struggled to complete in areas with poor or no mobile connectivity. This frustrated first-time users and creating a poor user experience at what could be a very difficult time.

Challenges the hospitals faced included:

Many of the site’s offices and support services operated from the vast basement (Level 1) of the hospital.

The fixed telephony estate and many paging services needed updating, and mobile was a vital component in replacement requirements.

The patient/visitor experience was poor as visitors had to search for areas of good connectivity, to provide updates to the rest of the family via SMS or phone call, before returning to the bedside.

The industry driven move to (Voice over Internet Protocol) VoIP and the public switched telephone network (PSTN) switch-off (Upgrading landlines to digital technology – what you need to know - Ofcom) meant that telephony traffic migrated to the data network. Given that voice is so critical at the site it was also vital that the Distributed Antenna System (DAS) provide a highly resilient telephony layer complementing data calling (VoIP), hybrid and unified communications (UC) services.

The hospital contact centre regularly reported issues contacting staff and often had 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.

An increase in demand led to the number of deployed corporate mobile devices rising from 600 to 2000 in three years. This placed a greater demand on mobile connectivity and support requirements to allow access to, and update of, systems services including the hospital electronic patient record (EPR) on the move.

Pagers and bleepers needed to be replaced with clinical communications applications (Epic) and ubiquitous mobile telephony, both of which required data connectivity.

Of the 4,500 pagers in use prior to the DAS implementation, around 4,300 have now been retired. The 200 still in use are primarily for critical services such as cardiac arrest alarms.

Paging has largely been replaced with Epic Secure Chat, an application-based solution which provides a more feature-rich messaging service and which operates over both the 4G and Wi-Fi networks, where messages from Secure Chat can be saved and attached to patient records.