Derby & Burton NHS to upgrade telephony with Cinos partnership

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) has entered into a partnership with Cinos to modernise its unified communications (UC) platform.

The Trust, formed from the merger of Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2018, is upgrading its separate telephony systems across five sites to a more robust and resilient UC telephony service.

This upgrade aims to provide a uniform user experience for all staff and facilitate better collaboration across sites and the community, the partnership says.

The new Cisco Powered sovereign UC telephony service, delivered from the Cinos Cloud, will be implemented in line with the NHS Internet First Policy. This service is designed to provide a secure and reliable communication platform that facilitates the adoption of hybrid working practices. In addition, a secure Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) service will enable the Trust to more accurately forecast call expenditures and prepare its telephony infrastructure for the eventual retirement of PSTN networks.

Simon Reynolds, Head of Voice Services at UHDB, emphasised the importance of this service in the Trust's operational environment. "Telephony is a key service in an acute clinical environment, and we needed to future-proof and maintain the viability of a stable telephony platform for our service users and our patients. Additionally, the required skill set to maintain such an old system has become harder to find," he said.

Reynolds further highlighted the need for a standardised telephony platform across the Trust's sites: "It has become a fundamental need for the Trust to provide a standardised platform and a way of seamlessly communicating internally across all sites. In addition, the Trust is looking at being cost-efficient with maintenance contracts and other services."

The Trust serves over a million people in South Derbyshire and East Staffordshire, requiring a scalable cloud-based platform to support its workforce. Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trust has seen a growing need for agile and home working solutions. Reynolds stated, "The Trust has over 14,500 staff, with around 9000 telephony users. We need to provide our agile workforce with the capability of maintaining access and making and receiving calls, regardless of where they're based, whether it is across sites or another remote location."

The new UC telephony platform also aims to integrate with Microsoft Teams, enhancing the daily communication needs of the Trust. Reynolds explained, "The new cloud-based telephony platform will allow our staff to easily communicate with each other without getting caught up in the busy switchboard service. We also want to ensure that whatever system we adopted had some level of integration with Microsoft Teams, because that's the platform that everyone uses on a day-to-day basis."

Additional measures include a new switchboard solution designed to enable both hospital switchboards to support each other when necessary. Cinos will also deploy an emergency telephone solution at both of the Trust's acute sites to ensure communication remains operational even during local outages. This increased resilience will extend to community sites through dedicated Cinos SIP connectivity, ensuring critical communication channels remain functional.

Dan Worman, Executive Director of Cinos, commented on the partnership, "Communications in the NHS is changing for the better. Over the past couple of years, we've seen Trusts like UHDB make significant strides in modernising their legacy telephony systems to ensure their workforces are supported by a reliable and resilient unified communication platform for anytime, anywhere communication. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the Trust and supporting them on their journey."

The project rollout has commenced at Royal Derby Hospital, with plans to extend the UC platform across the entire Trust by the end of the year.