UK NHS Benefits from Maintel and Swissphone Partnership

Since joining forces in January 2019, Maintel and Swissphone have already won a number of large projects in NHS Trust hospitals, with further projects in the pipeline.

Many NHS hospitals have older paging systems and pagers at the end of their lifecyle, creating a combination of low functionality and high maintenance costs. The alerting and messaging solution offered by Maintel and Swissphone allows NHS hospitals to renew their paging infrastructure with a state-of-the-art critical messaging system that allows them to cater to the needs of the different departments and roles with a single device. While crash teams and emergency ward teams require voice dispatch, text messages can be a more efficient and appropriate way of receiving information for other staff.

A Comprehensive Solution

The solution is geared towards excellent device usability, network coverage, guaranteed bandwidth availability and overall lifetime costs throughout all its components. Swissphone’s onsite paging infrastructure is highly redundant and resilient, and facilitates cost-efficient and seamless coverage, even in the most remote corners of an NHS site. The pagers provided by Swissphone are designed to give optimum radio performance, meaning coverage of any site can be guaranteed and are robust, being drop tested from 2 meters and waterproof to the IP 67 Standard – something that few smartphones can offer.

In addition, the solution allows Hospitals to centralise all alarms, paging systems and critical messages into one integrated solution. NHS organisations use Swissphone’s s.GUARD middleware solution to integrate to diverse systems such as IP Telephony, Nurse Call, Patient Monitoring, Fire Protection and Building Management Systems. Nursing personnel with different roles can be easily organised and streamlined so that alerts are only sent to the right people. This will help NHS teams to respond more quickly to patient calls, prevent a flood of alerts, and increase the efficiency of care. A Swissphone solution also allows a hospital to define different roles within teams and send alerts securely and efficiently via communication channels such as apps, sms, or voice calls.

One solution for many stakeholders

“We are extremely proud to have Maintel as our new partner. They have an excellent reputation within the NHS and proven expertise in system integration and service management.” says Graeme Hull, International Sales leader at Swissphone. “Our first projects with Maintel demonstrate that a solid and reliable critical messaging platform is vital for all stakeholders at an NHS hospital: doctors, nurses, patients, visitors, technical services, IT specialists, and facility management. A fleet of dedicated devices is necessary to cover the mission-critical communication requirements, with additional cloud-based critical messaging services relying on bring-your-own-device policies in order to integrate more users and use cases and improve overall efficiency. This is a good example of how critical messaging in the NHS might look like in the future,” he adds.

“Building on our proud track record of delivering successful digital transformation initiatives for NHS trusts, this exciting partnership with Swissphone will allow us at Maintel to add further value to the healthcare sector through our leading range of managed technology services.

Winning projects together so early in the relationship demonstrates how the Swissphone partnership will help the NHS trusts we serve to focus entirely on their priorities of delivering outstanding patient care and benefiting from seamless real-time communications in critical situations,” says Simon Yapp, Sales Director.