FACILITIES MANAGEMENT
Roll-out
Clarke said: “We started off with internal staff using it, throughout the UK, in our regional centres and national offices, but that’s been extended to outside the organi- sation, our members, and other bodies that have contact with us. It’s not just internal staff any more.
“There’s a real mix of uses it’s being put to, from one-to-one conversations to big meetings. We have quite a few homework- ers, who work as BMA staff. It helps stop feelings of isolation for those people work- ing from home, who otherwise would be without frequent contact with people they work with.
“We also have many meetings across all types of different end-points, such as tel- ephone participants, webcam participants and meeting room participants all speak- ing together. There’s a vast combination of the different types of end-points that can meet together.”
All around the world
Birch added: “We’ve had people giving evidence to the Supreme Court of Queens- land, to a courtroom; regularly we have people who not only give evidence but also lectures to universities. In the last two months, we’ve done China, Iran, Korea – and then the European venues, such as The Hague.
“There was a video conference this morn- ing with our Welsh office, and they were talking to an NHS site, but also two univer- sities, one in Swansea, and Yale College in Wrexham; that was just this morning.
“When there are large committee meeting shere at BMA House, with say 30 or 40 people involved, there will also be four or five individuals connecting in, often from their homes. Sometimes it’s to save on their travel, sometimes for the other reasons.
“But then other people will travel to the regional centres – Liverpool, Leeds, Bir- mingham, or wherever – if that’s easier than travelling to London, say.”
Keeping things clear
BMA staff and offices are using small HD webcams, Logitech C910s, with headsets from the same company, with automatic echo cancellation. Homeworkers also have access to broadband provided by the BMA, although Birch admits that the speeds they get are hardly superfast: 4mbps down- stream, and at least 512kbps up.
He said: “The video conferencing works on relatively low bandwidth. Obviously the lower it gets, the lower the quality of the picture, but generally the sound is still maintained.”
Clarke said BMA members can also just use their own equipment, but fewer guarantees can be made about that. He explained: “All we can do is give guidance based on our ex- perience and what we recommend.
“To a large extent, we’re at the mercy of what they have themselves, because it’s not part of our main infrastructure. But by and large, it works quite well, and people are starting to understand those expectations.”
Climbing the firewall
The software is designed to be used by peo- ple working in security-conscious environ- ments, such as hospital trusts and universi- ties, and will not hit firewall problems.
Birch explained: “They may be hit by their IT department saying ‘no you can’t install the software’, but generally once it’s in- stalled, we haven’t had any issues.
“A lot of the NHS sites will only allow ISDN traffic, they won’t allow IP across the inter- net, for security reasons, although some of them do. There’s so many different trusts, that’s the problem, and the different trusts and universities have got their own bridg-
ing companies, so we have to be able to connect with IP across the internet, and ISDN, and some individuals who can’t at- tend the meeting physically or can’t get to an office with a webcam will instead dial in via phone.
“So we’ll have webcams, video end points, but also people on telephones. We once had someone dialled in, claiming they kept dropping in and out of the meeting, then we found out he was on a mobile on a train!”
Convenience
The BMA’s national offices in London, Ed- inburgh, Cardiff and Belfast were all con- nected up ready for video conferencing quite early, with office-to-office commu- nication that then progressed to also use data-sharing, such as PowerPoint presen- tations.
But moving to a system that has also so easily allowed home users, people in offices with different IT infrastructure, and people using mobile phones to join in has proved very useful, they explained.
Clarke said: “We made the budget submis- sions for the new solution in 2010, and started implementing it in early 2011 in terms of the infrastructure. It’s quite differ- ent – not just the end units and the soft- ware, but in that we have a whole managed service from Videonations, with most of the infrastructure here at BMA House.
“One of our own challenges was to make sure we had full capability with all the different types of systems, not just room- based ones but also desktops, telephony, other trusts that have different infrastruc- ture to ourselves as well. In other words, the compatibility between the different sys- tems was going to be key for us.
“On top of that, the actual end units we use in some of our larger rooms here are very good in terms of quality and value for mon- ey. That was another big plus.”
He explained that as well as cutting down on travel costs and increasing convenience, the simple video conferencing system now used by the BMA encourages many more people to ‘attend’ meetings and conferenc- es that they may otherwise not have made the effort to travel to.
He added: “It’s about convenience and technology that works.”
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national health executive Jan/Feb 12 | 67
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