- Case Study
- Macclesfield District General Hospital
Macclesfield District General Hospital
Case StudyAbout
East Cheshire NHS Trust are a community and acute trust serving a large population of over 470,000 people. The trust employs over 3,000 staff who work across its community settings and three hospital sites.
Macclesfield District General Hospital is part of East Cheshire NHS Trust and provides a full range of hospital services including urgent and emergency care, critical care, general medicine including elderly care, emergency surgery, elective surgery in most specialties, cancer services, paediatrics, maternity care and a range of outpatient services.
The Brief
Macclesfield District General’s existing communications room had grown organically over a number of years as the trust’s services modernised. As a result, the cabinets and associated network of cabling had no further space to expand. The active heating pipework to the room also needed replacing and upgrading.
The trust appointed Sudlows to relocate the cabling infrastructure into a new, purpose-built communications rooms on the ground floor. The rooms needed to be fitted with the appropriate power, cooling and containment required by the hospital’s Facilities Team.
The Project
Radio Room
The legacy cabinets, containment and data cabling in the trusts radio room had expanded over time into an unmanageable state. Sudlows re-housed the cabling, live equipment and patching into a new 42U floor standing cabinet, replaced the surface trunking drops at the rear of the cabinet and re-housed all patch panels and associated cabling into the new cabinet.
Hospital wards
Within four of the hospital’s wards the cabinets and data cabling had also grown beyond capacity and were required to be re-housed into the new communications rooms with two new 42U standing cabinets.
As part of the work, Sudlows extended spare blown fibre tubes from the existing communications room and installed a new 8 core OM3 fibre bundle. The fibre was blown into the new communications rooms and set live before the changeover to ensure connectivity and uptime remained throughout the hospital.
Node fibres
Sudlows allowed for a new fibre patch panel in the existing and new communications rooms. The panels accommodate 48 cores of fibre at maximum capacity which will allow additional fibres to be added by the trust in the future, if expansion to the network is required.
Conclusion
Sudlows successfully re-housed all cabling and live equipment from Macclesfield District General’s existing communications room into new, modern and fit-for-purpose facilities within the hospital.
The improved infrastructure, with the increased capacity for fibre and additional cabling, will enable East Cheshire NHS Trust to operate more efficiently while ensuring their critical facilities are resilient and futureproof.
Testimonial
Torin Glazer, Project Manager at East Cheshire NHS Trust, said:
“From the initial proposal to the final installation and testing, Sudlows provided a comprehensive service to deliver the project to our specified requirements.”