South West Communications Group: Dorothy House Hospice Care
The backgroundSouth West Communications Group provides Dorothy House Hospice Care with a converged, turn-key solution that is viewed as a technology blueprint for hospices and care homes of the future.Dorothy House provides 24-hour hospice care from its purpose-built specialist in-patient unit in Winsley, near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Dorothy House also provides nurse care in the community and at its outreach centres in Midsomer Norton and Chippenham. The free care supplied by Dorothy House is partially funded by 19 charity shops located in the surrounding area, as well as from income generated from its conference suite situated within its Winsley base.The challenge Dorothy House's existing 10-year-old telephone system was out of date and lacked the functionality the Hospice required with no further development possible. The same was true of its existing nurse call system which was inflexible with poor battery life and very limited support available in the event of failure. Dorothy House needed a scalable, easy-to-use, resilient telephony solution for all 3 of its hospice buildings that could be seamlessly integrated solution with a new nurse call system, as well as the new access control solution it wanted to implement, and its existing security and fire alarm systems. It also wanted to replace its existing LAN infrastructure, which comprised a mismatch of different legacy manufacturers and technologies, with a new managed network capable of supporting the integrated telephony, nurse call and access solutions. Looking to the future, Dorothy House wanted to extend the telephony solution to its outreach centres where there was no telephony service in existence and to connect and integrate its 19 shops, which it expected to increase in number in the near future.The solution At first, Dorothy House was looking for a number of providers to meet these differing requirements, but following a meeting with South West Communications Group, realised that all of its requirements could be met by a flexible, single provider. Following a formal tender process, South West Communications Group was selected to deploy the following:·    Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise BiCS telephone system ·    Virtual server technology ·    IP handsets ·    DECT mobile handsets·    Centralised management and cost control ·    Unified communications ·    Remote and home working·    Voicemail and unified messaging·    Resilience·    Site-wide nurse call system·    Access control system·    Alcatel-Lucent LAN and wireless LAN (WLAN)·    Ongoing support and maintenance·    Training