Walsall Healthcare Put Their Trust In Splicecom

The Problem
Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust provides local general hospital and community services to around 275,000 people in Walsall and the surrounding areas. The Primary Care Trust (PCT) delivers high quality, friendly and effective community health services from some 60 sites including health centres and GP surgeries.


In 2015 the PCT was using 2 different systems to deliver telephone services to its sites; a Nortel 1000 Succession and a 3COM VCX. Both were aging, costly and proving a challenge to get 3rd party support for.


In searching for a suitable replacement, Walsall Healthcare IT Services considered open source systems from 3CX and Asterisk, as well as Unified Communications platforms from Avaya and Cisco. However, it was a recommendation for Splicecom, from their existing IT supplier, Switchshop, that proved to be the eventual winner. "When evaluating both the equipment and the costs, Splicecom proved to be the best value for money and best quality system around," said Mark Withington, Networks & Telecoms SME for Walsall Healthcare IT Services.



The Solution
Splicecom's Unified Communications platform is built on the British company's Vision application suite. It has enabled Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust to fulfil one of its key business requirements; transformation through technology.


Splicecom provides the much-needed ability to deliver call centre solutions to different departments, including the Trust?s own IT department. The historic reports and real time wallboards/dashboards that Vision provides allows the Trust to accurately measure productivity. Crucially, Vision produces the critical information required for audits which ensure that primary care organisations comply with Care Quality Commission (CQC) guidelines. The Splicecom system also provides call recording for public facing services and by using iPCS, which is an IP softphone client for Apple and Android smartphones, the workforce has become increasingly mobile and agile, yet always contactable.


To date the Splicecom system has been rolled out, over a 6-month period, to around 30 community based sites, supporting around 1,200 extensions.


The Result
"Splicecom have, on multiple occasions, proven their flexibility and desire to collaborate closely with Walsall Healthcare IT Services. They have worked in tandem with our IT services in the implementation of systems across multiple sites and, where required, provided custom features to satisfy customer needs. Compared to the two disparate systems we had before, this has provided a substantial cost saving on support and with the ability to move to SIP trunks from ISDN, further reductions have been made on line and call costs. We plan to continue to expand the system to more of our 60+ customers and possibly into an acute hospital environment as well." concludes Mark Withington.

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