University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) has signed a seven-year managed service contract with Azzurri Communications for its entire estate of fixed-line and mobile communications across its six hospital sites.
The £10 million contract will reportedly save it £1.7 m over the contract lifetime, standardising its ICT operations, easing complexity, increasing resilience, and simplifying ongoing expenditure management. James Thomas, UCLH ICT director, said: “From fixed line extensions to BlackBerry devices, pagers for on-call remote staff, and bleepers for consultants, downtime is not an option, but neither are spiralling costs. When it was time to update our ageing, disparate communications infrastructure, we looked to consolidate our spend while leveraging an improved service with greater cost savings.” Following Azzurri’s successful completion of an IP telephony service at UCLH’s University College Hospital, UCLH selected Azzurri to plan, project manage and implement a new Trust-wide communications strategy. Supported by seven permanent on-site engineers and a 24/7 helpdesk, this encompasses provision of fixed-line telephony, pagers, bleepers and BlackBerry devices. Eliminating the complexities of managing multiple communications providers and pricing, it is also helping the Trust trial patient entertainment systems.
