Birmingham’s Heartlands Hospital has installed Drax (UK)’s Connect SMS monitoring system.
One of England’s largest hospitals, Heartlands has seen extensive redevelopment over the past 20 years, which is set to continue to allow for modernisation, and care for a growing number of patients. Wherever possible the Trust strives to use and adapt existing FM systems during works to minimise costs and disruption. Drax’s Connect SMS system “fits perfectly” with this ethos, allowing the hospital to transmit signals from the existing fire and intruder alarm systems at Yardley Green (the old hospital site) to the main Heartlands building, facilitating cost-effective centralised monitoring. A GSM-based system for “simple, economical off-site monitoring 24 hours a day”, Connect SMS features remote transmitters hard wired to the monitored equipment’s outputs to read the signals generated, which are then sent as encoded, customised data SMS messages to the Connect SMS Manager PC, here located in the main Heartlands building. As the messages are transmitted as text, running costs are low, culminating in considerable savings for the hospital. Estates manager David Harrison explained: “Using BT private lines to transmit the signals was costing us £8,000 annually. Connect SMS transmits the same information for pennies. The equipment is also so easy to install that we installed and commissioned it ourselves.”
