Leeds University Hospital has officially opened the largest security control room within the NHS. Vigilant Technology provided their recording equipment. Last year Leeds Teaching Hospital marked a milestone with the transfer of patient services to a new, £220 million Bexley Wing at St James’ University Hospital from Cookridge.
Vigilant Technology provides all three of the Leeds hospitals with 30 day recording using their Xstream video servers. There are 66 terabytes of storage over the three sites, recording up to 144 cameras at Leeds General Infirmary, recording up to 96 cameras at St James’ and recording up to 96 cameras at Chapel Allerton. All of the systems can record every camera at speeds of up to 25 images per second at 4CIF resolution.
Darren Walton of Faber Maunsell, the consulting company who provided design and project management services for the project, says there are six hospitals in and around the city, some of which already have security systems linked to the CCTV monitoring based at Leeds General Infirmary.
Darren says “Centralised recording would have required massive bandwidth capacity and cost is obviously an issue. By using a separate infrastructure involving leased fibre optic connections, that are diversely routed between different hospitals, this arrangement is designed to provide sufficient bandwidth capacity to cope with future requirements; for instance as we expand the number of IP enabled cameras in the future.”
Peter Foy of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust says: “The step-up we’ve made in our surveillance capability recently has led to approached from Leeds City Council, who want to implement a partnership between us and its ‘LeedsWatch’ public monitoring scheme so that council operators
can link into some of our cameras covering areas such as hospital roads and car parks.”
Vigilant’s open platform allowed integration with the Cortech Datalog 4 security management software. The recorders are in communications equipment rooms at the hospitals; however all have links between each site so that channels can be viewed remotely from other hospitals where necessary.
The Vigilant Xstream IP digital video recording product can configure the system to meet end user needs, recording at up to 30 (NTSC) or 25 (PAL) frames per second per camera, in standard or high resolution. Visit www.VGLNT.com.
