With some 46 000 patients admitted to the hospital every year, a solution was sought to reduce the amount of time that clinicians spent walking through the wards to consult each other.

About 12 months ago the hospital began a trial of wireless technology and installed the infrastructure to support access to patient records and a rapid voice communication system using portable badges rather than phones.

Some 80 registrars, surgeons, visiting medical practitioners and nurses were involved in the trial.

The hospital's director of information services, Dr. Ralph Hanson, said his department is not focused on putting in IT for IT's sake and makes sure it assists clinicians in doing their job.

"We know IT brings benefits to health care delivery and we have made great progress over the past decade [and] done it in an environment where there is a strong service improvement culture," Hanson says. "You have to have it all in sync together with clinicians and their processes. We cannot put systems in that lock doctors and nurses down to desks and if we do not implement systems to facilitate mobility we are not providing the best service."

Hanson said the project has been about the connectivity and it is "all around us".

"When you translate that to the care clinicians give you can see the immediate benefits," he says. "The journey does not stop there - we need to get the systems to operate on more mobile devices like PDAs, and vendors need to look at those solutions."

The mobile and communications solution involved quite a few vendors, with Cisco Systems, Dell and Intel all having some input into the project.

The infrastructure consists of 40 Cisco 1200 Series wireless networking access points, 40 Vocera hands-free communication badges, 10 Dell notebook computers, which operate on customised, battery-powered trolleys known as COWS, or 'computers on wheels', and six Dell PDAs.

IBM designed the installation, upgrade and integration of the Cisco wireless network and the Vocera communications system.