Chelsea & Westminster Trust
State-of-the-art network makes medical imaging system possible at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
The Client
Chelsea & Westminster Health Care is a National Health Service Trust established in April 1994. Based at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in Fulham Road, in West London, the Trust provides general medical and surgical care to the communities of west London, as well as specialist services to patients from all over Britain. This Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, which opened in May 1993, provides a dazzling architectural backdrop for the creation of a healing environment, backed by dedicated staff and high standards of professional expertise.
Chelsea and Westminster is the largest hospital development in Britain and the first NHS teaching hospital to be built in London since the Seventies. It is one of the main teaching centres for the Imperial College School of Medicine.
The hospital has 460 beds and offers a wide range of medical and surgical care. Outpatient clinics, physiotherapy services, plain film X-rays and ultrasound scans are also provided by this Trust at the South Westminster Centre for Health. The Trust employs more than 2,000 staff and has an annual budget of £132 million.
The Challenge
The Trust has adopted a positive approach to the use of advanced technology, and has been a Logicalis customer since 1994. Previous work had included cabling services and the implementation of a 3Com LAN infrastructure. When the Trust decided to upgrade its campus-wide backbone, Logicalis was therefore front-of-mind as a trusted partner.
The project arose from a major infrastructure review based on a new requirement to support a state-of-the-art medical imaging system, along with existing network services. The decision was taken to replace the existing LAN infrastructure with a campus-wide backbone. The underlying technology and design criteria required the network to be flexible, future-proof and highly available. In particular, the network needed to be able to support the transfer of large medical images, at rates of 10Mbps in under 3 seconds across the network, without impacting other hospital services.
The Solution
Logicalis recommended migrating the existing 3Com ATM backbone to a high speed Gigabit Ethernet network based on Extreme Networks' product suite. Extreme Networks' BlackDiamond and Summit switches were chosen to provide the new high speed, maximum availability, QoS enabled Gigabit Ethernet network. This new network will consist of more than 3000 10/100Mbps data points supported by the Summit switches, with network concentration supplied by BlackDiamond switches.
Logicalis provided a full range of supporting professional services, including design, implementation and project management, as well as providing on-going 24x7 support and maintenance of the Chelsea and Westminster network delivered from its Ascot-based Network Operations centre.