The Client
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust (GOSH) is a national centre of excellence in the provision of specialist children's healthcare, delivering the widest range of care of any children's hospital in the UK. It is the only biomedical research centre for paediatrics, the largest centre in the UK for children with heart or brain problems, and with the UCL Institute of Child Health, the largest centre in Europe for children with cancer.

The Challenge
As part of its redevelopment programme, the hospital set out to upgrade its network to an infrastructure that would equip the hospital to work more effectively and efficiently, enabling it to comply with the N3 phase of the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

N3 was devised to provide the NHS with fast and reliable broadband networking services and to support the NPfIT’s aim of giving healthcare professionals access to patient information safely, securely and easily. 

“We wanted to ensure that we had a network which would enable us to stay at the forefront of specialist care,” 
said Sonny Neoh, Network Manager, GOSH.

The solution
GOSH was looking for an experienced healthcare ICT solutions provider to partner with it in developing its requirements.

Redstone Converged Solutions was chosen to provide GOSH with consultative advice and manage the development and installation of the LAN (Local Area Network) and IP telephony. The company continues to work with the hospital as a trusted partner, adding value to the network as it evolves.

Installation of the 1 Gigabit (Gb) switched high-speed Ethernet backbone was completed in September 2002. As a longstanding Cisco Gold Certified Partner, Redstone’s solution included Cisco Works and Cisco Wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment, Catalyst 6500 and Catalyst 3500 edge switches deployed in the clinical areas of the hospital.

“The new network gives us the speed and capacity necessary to meet the demands of running a busy hospital and focus on patient care. It is the resilient infrastructure which our core systems depend on, and one which we can build on,” commented Neoh.

In order to take full advantage of its upgraded network infrastructure andto improve call handling efficiency, in 2003 GOSH opted to migrate to a Cisco IP telephony platform. Migration initially took place in a hybrid environment with IP telephony deployed in the new build areas of the hospital, as older areas of the hospital continued to use the existing Siemens analogue system. This approach not only enabled the Trust to start realising the benefits of IP telephony but it also allowed it to protect the investment in its current PBX while managing the migration at its own pace.

The Outcome
The upgraded network links with the NHS mail system and as a result, clinical staff can take the same email account with them if they move to a different Trust. This saves hospitals the time and administration involved in opening and closing email accounts, and is particularly beneficial among junior doctors who are on six month rotations between different hospitals.

GOSH has fulfilled its aim of participating in the NHS’s electronic services by realising the benefits that can be achieved from a secure and resilient network. The hospital is now part of two of the NHS’s key new working practices – ‘Choose and Book’, giving patients more say in their treatment, and ‘Electronic Staff Records’, securing HR information centrally.

“We now have a network that does far more than was previously possible, and a partner working with us to develop both the network and the IP telephony. Redstone’s advice and abilities have taken us from an old and slow system to participating in the services of the modern NHS,” said Neoh.