West Midlands Ambulance Service
Case Study
“Network reliability and availability are absolutley essential when people’s lives are at risk”
Supporting West Midlands Ambulance ‘999’ and Blue-light Services.
West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (WMAS) serves a population of 5.6 million people across Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Coventry, Birmingham and the Black Country. They respond to approximately 4,000 ‘999’ calls each day. And employ around 5,000 people in 15 hubs across the region.
They also provide around 1 million non-emergency transport journeys for patients who are unable to travel without help, because of their medical condition or clinical need.
The Challenge
From their sites in Brierly Hill and Stafford, WMAS provide essential ambulance services to the public. Their locations house twin datacentres and control rooms that run both the emergency ‘999’ service and the non-emergency patient transport service that helps people travel to hospitals for scheduled treatment outside of emergencies.
Any disruptions or technical problems with their voice and data communications can have wide reaching and life-threatening consequences. System ‘down-time’ is simply unacceptable, and a smooth running of the service is absolutely crucial.
Support Services
Convergence Group (CG) has been a partner of WMAS for over 10 years, providing technical help and break fix support for their Cisco and Aruba infrastructure.
The support covers LAN and WAN performance and interoperability with the WMAS datacentre infrastructure that underpins control room operations for 200 key staff across their two main sites.
In the control rooms, WMAS operatives deal with emergency calls – managing and dispatching ambulances using their Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system.
In 2018 WMAS asked CG to provide additional on-site resources at times of need, when key
members of the Network and Infrastructure team are away from the office on holiday or due to other commitments.
CG now provide three dedicated support engineering staff on a call-off basis. They have been formally trained by WMAS, and they cover on-site infrastructure performance, break fix resolution, and network monitoring.
The Future
The relationships and partnership between the organisations continue to thrive, and the introduction of the phone based ‘111’
non-emergency medical service will see a third control room added, with the number of WMAS operatives rising to around 250.
When people’s lives and health are at stake, reliable services and systems are absolutely essential to support front-line staff.
For more information contact our Specialist Team.
