Aintree University Hospital NHS provides care to 1.5 million residents across Merseyside and the Northwest of England. A £35 million programme sees the Foundation Trust’s urgent care and trauma unit transformed into a state-of-the-art facility, allowing the hospital to enhance the patient journey and provide hospital staff with the ability to offer the best care to the 80,000 patients who pass through the emergency department each year.
The hospital already utilised Inner Range’s ‘Insight’ software component to manage and administer their integrated hardware platform, Concept, also manufactured by Inner Range. The system had grown from just over 40 access controlled doors in 2002 to over 450. The construction of the new Accident & Emergency department meant an additional 80 access controlled doors and extensions would need to be added to the Insight system. Furthermore, with substantial site expansion planned over the next five years, the hospital would need the scalability to increase access control from 450 to 1000 doors.
When considering a security system for the new A&E department as well as the future expansion requirement of 550 access controlled doors, the hospital felt this was the best time to upgrade to Integriti, Inner Range’s latest security management system and take advantage of its new features and enhanced performance.
GRANTfen Fire and Security Ltd (GRANTfen) installed the Integriti software onto a server PC and connected each of the 7 new Integriti controllers; pre-programming the entire system off-site. The existing controller programming and user database were transferred to the new Integriti software and GRANTfen developed a method of testing each step of the programming in the upgrade to Integriti process, allowing the system to be deployed with the minimum of disruption to the site. Once this task was completed, the controller programming and user database were transferred onto a virtual server, housed within the hospital’s own data centre; a simple licence transfer from Inner Range enabled GRANTfen to complete this element quickly and efficiently.
Following this task, the existing Concept controllers were replaced with Integriti Security Controllers (ISC). The ISC was mostly backwards compatible with the existing Concept field devices which made this quite simple; all field devices that were not directly backward compatible were disconnected from the data line and then the remainder were connected to the ISC and within seconds were working correctly. Then in turn, each of the field devices that were not directly compatible were upgraded with a simple firmware enhancement and connected to the data network. This enabled GRANTfen to keep downtime to an absolute minimum which was especially important in emergency areas.
Graham Cole, Operations Director at GRANTfen said: “Inner Range has always been a quality product; we still have hardware that is still working perfectly after over ten years in constant operation. The Integriti hardware and software allowed the system to be upgraded whilst still utilising the client’s considerable investment in existing field device hardware. This means the client now has a system that is right up to date and ready to grow to meet its future requirements.” The entire project including planning, pre-programming and deployment of Integriti on-site took only four weeks.
The hospital’s investment means their system is scalable to handle future expansion plans with ease. The hospital has benefited greatly from a system that delivers increased speed and performance and is much easier to administer. In the future, the hospital hopes to: integrate their CCTV into Integriti to provide a centrally managed security framework, integrate their car park system and wireless locking systems (Assa Abloy Aperio & Salto Sallis) and integrate a wireless staff enrolment system to help ease busy periods.
