Royal Derby Hospital adopts cloud-based telephony platform

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton (UHDB) NHS Foundation Trust has partnered with systems integrator Cinos to modernise its unified communications platform.  

Roll out of the Cisco-powered telephony service is underway at Royal Derby Hospital and is planned to be incorporated across the trust by February 2025.

UHDB, which provides acute treatment and care for more than a million people in South Derbyshire and East Staffordshire, required a cloud-based platform to provide easy access to staff working across the trust.

Simon Reynolds, head of voice services at UHDB said that it has become “a fundamental need” to provide a standardised platform across the trust’s sites.

“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 cloud-based telephony platform will allow our staff to easily communicate with each other without getting caught up in the busy switchboard service,” Reynolds said.

He added that the system integrates with Microsoft Teams, which is used by staff on a day-to-day basis.

Following the merger of Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2018, the organisation spanned across five sites with separate telephony systems.

A session initiation protocol (SIP) service will also be implemented, allowing the trust to more accurately forecast call expenditures whilst future-proofing its telephony infrastructure to prepare for the retirement of PSTN networks in 2027.

The switchboard solution will enable both hospital switchboards to support each other, if and when the need arises.

Cinos will also deploy an emergency telephone solution at both of the trust’s acute sites to guarantee that key handsets within the trust, used for raising emergencies and summoning crash teams, remain operational even in the event of local outages.

Dan Worman, executive director of Cinos, said: “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.”

In June 2024, UHDB rolled out the BadgerNet electronic patient record and Badger Notes online portal in its maternity services.