Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Gloucester, United Kingdom

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust includes Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, Cheltenham General Hospital and Stroud Maternity Unit. It employs around 8,000 people, providing care for the population of Gloucestershire and beyond.

Through a PFI (Private Finance Initiative), the Trust has been able to modernise its hospital buildings and transform services. Working with Apleona, the FM provider, Thorlux recommended installing the SmartScan wireless emergency lighting system.

Applications Covered:

Healthcare

The Challenge

The previous system at Gloucester Royal Hospital was a wired auto-test system riddled with failures. These failures caused constant maintenance and compliance challenges. The logistics required in testing the emergency lighting to conform to the legislation had become increasingly difficult. At this point, Thorlux was able to offer a solution.

The Solution

What makes SmartScan an attractive option from the hospital’s point of view is the accessibility of information. Six hundred emergency luminaires are wirelessly linked into five SmartScan Gateways. These collect and transmit their status information to the World Wide Web for viewing using tablets, smartphones, laptops and computers. The SmartScan Gateways provide daily uploads of the system status to the website. Secure access allows the user to view the full luminaire status of the whole installation, individual groups of luminaires or individual control gear items within a luminaire. The website provides an easy-to-read visual reference highlighting the following:

Lamp status in emergency operation
Number of hours that a lamp has operated from the battery
Integral battery is connected and charging
Result of the last monthly function test and the date of the next scheduled test
Result of the last annual duration test and the date of the next scheduled test
Emergency lighting testing schedules

Another benefit of SmartScan for the Estates team at the hospital is its ease of installation, particularly in retrofit situations. SmartScan uses the latest wireless mesh technology to replace wired communications signals between each luminaire. 868MHz secure radio communication offers excellent transmission distance within buildings, each luminaire acting as a wireless node to repeat commands to the next luminaire. This method provides a robust system that will always find a communication path.