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Health & Hospitals>
Basildon Hospital Upgrades to Digital
2 Mar 2005
The NHS Foundation Trust is upgrading its analogue set up for Dedicated Micros DS2 digital video recorders. Across the hospital’s three sites - Basildon Hospital itself, its adjacent maternity unit and a day care unit 10 miles away at Orsett - more than 100 cameras are now in place internally and externally at key sites including car parks. In the past, only 30 cameras covered the hospital with each of the sites using a different system.
Eddie Smith, the hospital’s security supervisor and CCTV controller, said: “I am a former policeman and everything I have had to deal with as a policeman, I have had to deal with at this hospital. The high quality images have already produced several detections and successful convictions - the local police have been full of praise for the new set-up. As well as catching more people, all the additional cameras are proving a highly effective deterrent.“
CCTV cameras have also been installed at Fobbing Farm - an estate used to house doctors and their families, which had been targeted by burglars last year. Eddie Smith explains: “It is in a vulnerable area and is cut off from the rest of the hospital. Last year we had a spate of burglaries so the doctors asked us to install cameras there as well; since then we have not seen a recurrence of the problem.” All the cameras at the various sites link back to a central CCTV control room, where they can be viewed on PCs via the hospital’s computer network. With 320GB of memory each, the eight DS2s offer the hospital 30 days of storage space.
Further DS2s are to be added to the system to cover extra cameras which are planned for the hospital’s state-of-the-art cardiac unit and an independent cancer scanning building, which is due to open at the end of this year. By the time the installation is finished, it is envisaged that the hospital will be served by 200 cameras and 16 DS2s.
Dave Neil, who worked on the installation for European Alarms, said: “There is no other site like it in the country in terms of the number of cameras. It’s certainly the biggest project we have taken on so far. The feedback so far from the hospital suggests they are delighted with what we have done and the performance of the Dedicated Micros equipment. I’ve got nothing but praise for DM and their staff - we wouldn’t use anybody else. The equipment is of the highest quality and the technical and after sales support they offer are excellent.“
DM’s training package also represented a major improvement on their old system, where they were given little or no guidance. With DM, Eddie Smith and his IT liaison officer from the hospital were flown to Manchester and put through a training course which has improved their competency dramatically. The digital method of storing images also means the system does not rely on staff remembering to install tapes and offers much better quality images.
Eddie Smith adds: “Each of the hospital’s three sites had its own stand alone system, managed by three different companies. Now, to have a universal system across the whole of the trust has made a huge difference. The other key advantage for us was being able to view the images on the computer network rather than on a huge bank of monitors. The digital images are much clearer and with 24 hour recording, we can go back any time over the last 30 days and view what happened from any of the cameras.”
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