SECURITY AND ACCESS CONTROL


Case study: Birmingham Trust secures access with SALTO Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS


Challenge


Foundation Trust has selected SALTO Systems and Halesowen-based supplier, installer, integrator, and maintainer of electronic security solutions, Custom Technology Solutions, to provide access control for its buildings, and to enhance security for its staff and patients. The Trust provides high quality community and specialist services within Birmingham and the West Midlands. It delivers over 100 clinical services in hospitals, health centres, and clinics. It also provides nursing services in older people’s homes, as well as services for adults, children, and people with learning disabilities, and those with rehabilitation needs, and also provides NHS dental services.


“Healthcare facilities need to provide protection against a wide range of threats – including theft, burglary and intruders, while safeguarding the security of their staff and patients. This explains the need to update, consolidate, and replace, our various security systems with one site-wide access control system that is reliable, long-lasting, and scalable," said Simon Bates, head of Risk Management and Emergency Planning at the Trust.


Background


With 5000 staff working in over 93 buildings across the Trust estate, which covers a large geographical area from Bromsgrove to Sutton Coldfield, security had become fragmented over the years, with a mix of physical keys on one site, push-button digital locks on another, and basic access control on yet another. This meant there was no coherent policy across the Trust, with an inconsistent approach to security, and especially access control.


Simon Bates explained: “With different staff required to use different credentials, depending on where they were working, and with the need to give agency nurses temporary access rights based on their working schedules, not to mention the inefficiency of the legacy set-up, we knew that the time had come to address this, so we started casting around for a solution to the problem. “We looked at a number of products and systems, but after having SALTO demonstrate to us a system that was already in use with another NHS Trust, and having meetings with it as the manufacturer, and local SALTO authorised partner, Custom Technology Solutions, to demonstrate how it could be tailored to exactly what we needed, and how we needed it to work for us, we were sold.”


62 Health Estate Journal September 2021


“The key driver for us is to preserve the high quality of healthcare on offer, while ensuring maximum security across the diverse range of estate buildings,” explained Andy Perry, Sales manager at Custom Technology Solutions. “Utilising our expertise in the field of security, we help simplify day-to-day life for site managers like Simon by ensuring that patients, medical staff, and property, are protected.”


The challenges involved in securing a hospital or other healthcare environment are unlike those in almost any other building. How this is achieved depends on many factors – including the level of security and convenience required in specific areas such as operating theatres, consulting rooms, pharmacies, laboratories, drug cabinets, surgical wards, and so on, but whatever the access control solution used, it has to be both secure and flexible, so that staff and patient safety are maintained.


Solution


Having taken the decision to standardise access control on the SALTO solution, installation got underway at various sites, including a substantial upgrade at Moseley Hall Hospital in Birmingham, and now over 700 doors – including main entrances, offices, wards, and clinical areas – have been secured across the Trust. The installation includes a flexible mix of online and offline doors, typically consisting of an online main door and offline handle sets on all internal doors. Products fitted include XS4 original and XS4 One handle sets on doors, XS4 wall readers at strategic points in the building, and XS4 locker locks on bedside cabinets to secure individual patient medication. A number of key safes are also used at the hospital, while SALTO contactless smart cards give authorised staff access to these, as well as providing a full audit trail on what card opened what safe at what time. Administration of the system is managed by the Clinical Administration Team based in the control centre at the


Administration of the access control system is managed by the control centre at Birmingham Dental Hospital at Pebble Mill.


Birmingham Dental Hospital at Pebble Mill. They oversee the day-to-day issuing of cards – which are combined photo ID and access cards – and instigate change of access permissions, and cancellation of lost cards etc. All staff cards can also access a printer.


Estates personnel also have access to the system, and are responsible for carrying out general maintenance on the doors, and changing batteries in the handle sets as they become due etc. There is also close integration between Estates and the IT Department, so that when ‘Estates’ want to fit access control to a new door, the IT Department makes sure that there is a network point and an IP address ready for the installation.


Elimination of lost key problem Simon Bates said: “Having SALTO massively helps us. We like the ability to restrict access quickly and easily, and security risks related to lost physical keys have been eliminated. We now have no costs of lock replacement from lost keys or codes, which saves valuable time and resources across the Trust.


Moseley Hall Hospital.


“Moving forward, on each new project across the Trust, SALTO will now be part of it. Changing over to a modern, technologically innovative, contactless solution has also paid dividends during the current COVID crisis. Contactless cards, with the option to migrate to a mobile solution via smartphones when we’re ready, have been really useful. Other plus points include remote access and online features, and the ease to set up users and change access permissions, all of which help with agile working. Although security, and in particular access control, was not initially part of the Trust’s culture, we have now convincingly turned ourselves into a smarter hospital, with good support from both SALTO and local partner, Custom Technology Solutions.”


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