North East London Foundation Trust:
a joined-up platform adds up to
better care

The North East London Foundation Trust provides care for patients in four boroughs (Redbridge, Havering, Waltham Forest and Barking & Dagenham). The Trust employs 1,800 people across a wide area, often working at sites previously run by different healthcare trusts. As a result, their existing network was a patchwork of badly linked systems and bottlenecks, with a frustratingly slow performance. It was time for a change.

A poorly integrated infrastructure was preventing the Trust from delivering the standard of care patients required. They also needed to reduce costs dramatically, so they asked us to deliver a joined-up solution that answered both requirements.

When the North East London Foundation Trust was formed, it inherited a complicated network infrastructure. Namely, a jigsaw of multiple suppliers and numerous systems spread across 32 geographical sites.

It’s no wonder the Trust found it difficult to keep staff connected, keep costs under control, and deliver the service that patients expected.

They needed a strong partner to help them break from three existing communications suppliers. Then, they wanted to bring everything together into one cohesive data and voice network. And that’s where we stepped up to the mark.

We recommended a Metro Ethernet VPN and ISDN solution that would deliver a high-capacity converged network – capable of meeting all their needs, across all sites. This brought everything together in a single voice and data platform, linking every site within the Trust under one high-speed umbrella.

For the first time, the Trust is now able to connect all sites via a single network. Staff can now access centralised patient records, which makes it much easier to keep treatment details up to date, even across different outpatient clinics. The bandwidth boost has also had a dramatic effect on the time it takes to perform even the simplest network tasks, speeding up communication all round.

Telephone calls are carried over the converged network too, thanks to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. And not only are all internal calls between clinics and sites now free, but external calls are also on more favourable tariffs. All of which has helped drive down telephone bills.

The Trust has already installed a centralised call centre to deal with patient calls more effectively, while also keeping staff connected. And they’re not stopping there, with plans to introduce electronic prescriptions and links to other Trusts.

Bringing their fragmented, outdated system into the 21st Century has given them a modern, efficient infrastructure that will grow with them in the future. One that delivers the performance they’ve been craving, without costing the earth. So they can focus on delivering the level of service patients deserve. When you have finished with this document please recycle it.

“Disruption to our operational and clinical services was minimal, and if staff noticed any change at all, it was that connection speeds suddenly became a lot faster. Previously, low bandwidth meant that personnel in many of our locations either couldn’t open the system or had to wait a long time for information to load. It’s transformed the way that our operational and clinical teams work,” said Peter Gooch, CRS Project Director at North East London Foundation Trust.