Need some help with a Hospital solution 1

[JohnnyMc509]

Hi,
One of the sites I oversee is a small Hospice. At night there is usually only two nurses on staff and a lot of things to do. There is a problem with the nurses being away from the nurses station telephone and them being able to hear the phone and get back to it. The Hospice has three long hallways of rooms. We are not allowed to use any cordless or cellular phones because of interferance with medical equipment. The idea that was brought up is to install one phone in each hallway (the jacks are already wired) and set them up with a bridged appearance to the nurse station phone. Problem is we do not want them to ring because that will disturb the patients. We would like to install a few speakers and have them emit a soft tone when the phone rings but we would also like to be able to turn this off during the daytime. Has anyone ever seen a setup like this? Anyone have any other ideas?

 

[PBXJay]

You might also want to try installing an adjunct that flashes when a call is in. I'm not sure how annoying that would be at night though..

-Jay

 

[Phoneman2]

The ringer volume can be set pretty low on the phones, and you could change the type of ring or tone you get. The night time use could be set as a cover ext from the main desk phone. So at night with the desk phone with cover set on it would ring to the hall phones as wall. With the cover on the hall phones going back to the desk phone. Do you want them to be able to answer in the hall phone or just at the desk? Does the desk phone have voice mail? So many buttons So little time
Thanks All
Phoneman2

 

[vaoldschl]

What type of equipment are you using that you can't use cordless? I administer the system for a 100 +/- bed hospital and I have wireless all over, Spectralink @ 900 mhz, cordless 900 mhz, wireless LAN at 2.4 GHz and multiple UHF and VHF two way radios on many frequencies in addition to telemetry. You might look into renting a spectrum analyzer to look at your real interference levels. When I did my study I found that cordless telephones had absolutely no effect on our medical equipment, Cellular had very little and high powered RF only affected equipment when transmitting from a proximity less than 6 inches. I haven't priced anything from them in a while but I know SpectraLink makes a small system that will solve your problem.

 

[kcbell]

Let me say something in general regarding wirelss communication - not cell phones.

Most wireless phone that you find in the market today has very low power(30 mw to 100mw max) and the frequency can be in the range of 900 Mhz to 1.9 Ghz. The technology that they use normally is spread spectrum. As far as my understand, they do very little to none interference to other equipment. A hospice should not have a lot of sensitive equipment. Even if there are a lot of equipment; I am sure the low wattage of those phone will not interfere. I guess technically there is no problem. The problem is how to convince the none-technical to allow you to use it.

Flashing light in parellel with the phone would be my suggestion. Since it is a small hospice, I guess there is no PBX but a analog key system must be in place. I would parellel all phones in the hallway to be in the same call pickup group. If such feature is available.

Happy phoning!

 

[ken07734]

A flashing light would be a problem in a hospice, they have been linked to epilectic seizures in some patients. That would become a liability to the Hospice.

 

[EPalle]

Attention.... long answer...

What I would do is maybe basic but not expensive (I assume that you have a Definity installed).
Try to follow this setup:
You have 1 main telephone (nurse room) ext 8000
You have 3 hallway telephones ext 9000, 9001 and 9002

I would create an extra internal station (ext 7000), but with port X (so no physical station).
The Definity can route calls to a certain extension depending on the time (coverage time-of-day). So you can create a cov path that will route calls to Audix during the day time and automatically will route the calls to ext 7000 as from 21:00 (or whenever the night shift starts).
I would then use a bridge-app on ext 9000, 9001, 9002 with ext 7000. This will make sure that if a call is routed to ext 7000 station 9000, 9001 en 9002 will start ringing.

As mentioned, you can't have the phones ringing (to much noice). That can be solved by putting the option "Bridged Call Alerting" on the station sheet (Page 2) to N.
You need to do this for extension 9000, 9001, 9002.
If somebody calls to ext 7000, station 9000, 9001, 9002 will not ring, only the brdg-app buttons will flash (maybe that is enough during the night??).
I'm not sure how to connect a speaker on to this, but I think that Avaya will have some options.
What you also can do is to put on ext 9000, 9001 and 9002 the option "Bridged Call Allerting" to Y and the "Active Station Ringing" to single.
Then the 3 phones will only ring 1 time but the call will stay.

Using the coverage time-of-day, the calls will be routed automatically. So when the night shift is over (at 08:00?) the calls will be routed to Audix.

Hope this solves your problem.
If you need more info: Epalmans@Yahoo.com

Regards,
Erik.