The Queen Elizabeth Hospital provides healthcare services to West and North Norfolk in addition to parts of Breckland, Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire. It has a catchment area of more than 750 square miles and 331,000 people. The Trust wanted to extend their limited Wi-Fi to allow patients to stay in contact with family and friends as well as keeping entertained.
In addition to this, they wanted to encourage the use of technologies to reduce paperwork and help doctors and nurses with their medical administration. They were also following the recommendations of a report commissioned by the government and Martha Lane Fox to improve the use of online technology in the health service.
The hospital needed the guarantee that:
This project presented GCL with a number of challenges including:
The hospital was active, with numerous patients passing through the corridors, so GCL’s experience working in busy and occupied areas was appreciated. Physical safety barriers were deployed to provide exclusion zones. Galvanised cable baskets and trunking were used at high level for routing cables necessitating the ‘working at height’ regulations to be employed. Specially qualified engineers with suitable personal protective equipment worked within ceilings where asbestos may have been present. Moreover, project planning with the inclusion of clinical staff was critical to ensure that works were completed during the prescribed periods that the wards were vacated, so that patient care was not compromised.
The hospital now has a modern, cost-effective cabling solution, and will benefit from:
GCL Building Technologies specialises in delivering sustainable services and products for commercial properties and construction projects, promoting environmental consciousness while providing cost-saving solutions.