The background
South West Communications Group provides Velindre NHS Trust with a flexible telephony and data system to suit its variety of healthcare services and the staff that deliver them.
Velindre NHS Trust, based in Cardiff, was established in 1994 and has steadily grown to manage a budget of more than ￡150 million providing a range of specialist services at local, regional and all Wales levels. The Trust comprises of a variety of divisions that specialise in services as diverse as testing and caring for cancer patients at Velindre Hospital through to managing the Digital All Wales Network from Health Solutions Wales for NHS Wales.
The challenge
South West Communications Group has been involved with Velindre NHS Trust since 2005 when it required a new telephone system that had to be connected to the private Welsh Health Telephone Network, which links all the major hospitals in Wales.
The challenge also included communications provision for its Breast Test Wales staff that carry out breast screening services at health centres in Cardiff, Swansea and Llandudno as well as from 10 mobile units that work across the Principality visiting more than 100 sites in every 3-year round of screening.
In addition, in 2007 the Trust was awarded the responsibility for Wales’s bowel screening programme to be run from a newly built centre in Llantrisant for 50-plus members of staff, which would include a call centre to receive queries from patients.
The solution
Following a formal tender process, Velindre NHS Trust selected South West Communications Group to deploy an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise telephone system and associated software for its 200 users at its existing headquarters followed by the installation of an additional system, complete with call centre functions, for the 50-plus users at the new bowel screening centre. The solution provides the following:
- Auto-attendant services enable the queuing of up to 8 calls on 2 free phone numbers
- Out of hours call handling utilising a bilingual messaging system
- Unified communications
- Disaster recovery using non geographic inbound services
- Selective call recording for training and quality purposes
- Contact centre software and hardware
- Centralised management
- Voicemail
For more on this case study, please click here
