The Orders of St John Care Trust (OSJCT)

At a glance

The issue: Telephony is critical for connecting residents with their families and enabling instant access to emergency services when required. The existing telephony infrastructure was obsolete.

The project: Maintel designed, deployed, and managed a reliable, future-ready, and cost-effective Ring Central Unified Communications solution.

The outcome: Residents and employees  benefit from improved communication while end-to-end visibility and centralised management assist the IT team with fast fault finding.

The Background

OSJCT provides trusted care, support, and housing to residents and tenants in 62 homes and 8 extra care housing schemes across Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, West Sussex, and Wiltshire.

OSJCT is a not-for-profit charitable trust employing 4,000 staff to offer specialised dementia care, intermediate care, respite, day care, and expert nursing.

The Challenge

The Trust’s on-premise Samsung telephony systems were becoming outdated and had reached end of support, while demand from residents and families for streamlined contact was increasing.

To de-risk the business and enable easy, reliable, feature-rich and efficient communication for employees and residents, the forward-thinking Trust wanted to make the most of the fibre infrastructure and extended Wi-Fi coverage it had recently installed and move to a cloud-based or hosted solution that would support future operational needs and growth.

OSJCT’s mixed estate was challenging, comprising old, listed buildings through to modern new builds built to specification. Along with deploying VOIP handsets for employees across the care homes, they needed soft phone integration to the Microsoft Teams platform at regional hubs, and headquarters, the Trust needed emergency call capabilities for its 1,200 non-sim card e-care mobile devices.

Those tablets must remain within a closed network to safeguard residents’ personal data but also make external emergency calls displaying a local ID under the Telecoms regulations – a combination which, at the time, was impossible.

As care homes are operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the work required to deliver a better customer experience would need to take place with minimal disruption  to employees, residents, or the family members calling in and offer the same experience across all sites.

The Solution

Maintel’s solution was based on RingCentral’s best-in-class UCaaS technology, built on an award-winning platform and network. The out of the box platform was designed  for call centres rather than care homes, so the standard IVR referred to agents instead of colleagues. Maintel worked closely with RingCentral to adapt the scripts and ensure it maintained the changes after any system reboot or RingCentral platform update.

Maintel’s close relationship with RingCentral was also critical to enabling the Trust’s e-care devices to make emergency calls. Instead of adding the costs of mostly dormant SIM cards to the devices, Maintel worked with the global company for 3 months, persuading them to ringfence the Trust and adapt the platform to comply with blue-light Telecoms regulations, enabling staff to make contact with 999 services instantly without having to find a fixed line phone and leaving a residents side.

Additionally, Maintel worked with RingCentral’s team to design and deploy a workaround to support the 34 different door entry systems, including many analogue solutions, found across the Trust’s estate, giving OSJCT Property Team time to deploy a permanent solution estate-wide.

What are the benefits?

Stability and resilience – Service reviews to date show zero unexpected downtime.

Infinite scalability – OSJCT has recently acquired Elmfield Care and The Fremantle Trust, comprising 14 additional sites. The team can now easily replicate the same model across them. When the Trust builds new care homes, it can apply the same template to each one.

End-to-end visibility – The Trust’s IT team now has access to a suite of reports and analytics with a “single pane of glass” portal view. Call quality statistics clearly pinpoint issues, making fault-finding fast and straightforward.

£20K pa cost savings – The innovative new solution’s costs are broadly similar to the outdated legacy system, but future savings are anticipated. The Trust anticipates reducing its MS Teams estate which could reduce licensing by £20,000 annually.

Standardised internal calling – Maintel replaced random direct dial numbers with 3-digit site codes and uniform 3-digit extension numbering across sites for standard roles and departments to make internal calling easier.

Green IT – By removing 64 PBXs, the estate is using less power and less rack space, and site visits to carry out repairs and maintenance are minimized thanks to portal visibility.

24-hour IT support – While the Trust’s IT helpdesk is available during the day, on the rare occasion the Trust has had a local issue out of hours, Maintel’s support desk has been contacted for fault reporting and timely resolution.

Enhanced service quality – Improved call handling and routing across the care homes ensure calls are answered faster, and fewer calls are left unanswered. A template is applied across all homes involving IVR and call groups when reception is unavailable.

Estate awareness – J Brand’s estate survey reports added extra value, providing additional information about the contents of comms rooms, and detailing lost and forgotten equipment at sites that hadn’t had a recent visit.