Scottish Ambulance Service Rings The Bell Of BT and Datapulse For Call Recording

Although the Scottish Ambulance Service covers the whole of Scotland, employing around 3,500 staff operating out of more than 150 locations, it centres emergency call handling at just three Emergency Medical Dispatch Centres, (EMDCs), one each in Inverness, Paisley and Edinburgh. There is also an Air Ambulance Control Centre in Dundee which doubles as a Disaster Recovery location.

In the financial year 2002/03 there were over 500,000 responses to accident and emergency calls, and in excess of 2 million non-emergency journeys undertaken, as well as over 2,800 missions flown by the service's air ambulances. Around a million calls a month are made to or from the three EMDCs and five further national and divisional headquarters.

The project to concentrate emergency call handling at the three EMDCs from the previous eight operations rooms was started in 2002 and completed in March 2004. A large part of the enabler for this centralisation was the installation of a Nortel Meridian 1 Option 61 telephone system at each EMDC site, along with a networked Symposium call centre server system. Utilising the latest in call centre technologies, the service has been able to smoothly merge operations rooms, and provide significantly enhanced call handling to all its callers.

The use of emerging technologies in the provision of services to callers is a process that never stops, and as well as using very advanced systems, for instance ones that take the callers "Calling Line Identity" on emergency 999 calls to pinpoint the caller's whereabouts, the service also has an obligation to record conversations for the protection of all parties on those calls.

This obligation is expanded to a requirement for EMDC staff to have near instantaneous recall of conversations to listen again, for example, to an incoherent caller unable to give a proper or full address, to clarify to third parties exactly what has been said, and indeed sometimes, for evidential purposes, if circumstances demand.

Eveline Dempster, Datapulse sales for Scotland explains: "In ambulance services, as with all organisations that deal with emergency calls, fast, accurate retrieval of information can be the difference between life and death. Callers can sometimes be distressed and give vague, inaccurate information. This sets the foundations for mistakes that can often result in legal action. Voice Recording gives operators the peace of mind that each conversation can be quickly and easily retrieved and replayed at any time from any location.'

The obligation on the ambulance service to be able to provide recordings of telephone conversations is a longstanding one, and one which is taken very seriously. As such, the service had previously used a number of systems, but all had drawbacks in one area or another that were never addressed.

Whilst rolling out the project to replace the telephone systems, BT was approached with a request for information about the new Integrated Digital Voice Recorder, (IDVR), from the Datapulse portfolio. Having been provided with the responses from BT and Datapulse, the service elected to extend the original telephone systems project contract to include provision of an IDVR system at each of the three EMDC sites, and one also at the Dundee Airwing site.

In order to maximise its local accountability, part of the service's plan was to move non-emergency service staff out from the original eight operations room sites and into some 30 of Scotland's hospitals. This relocation of staff would be supported by the Nortel Networks remote office solution, where a host site (an EMDC) connects to the remote site, (the hospital), via a 2Mbps digital private circuit. The remote sites can have up to 32 extensions, which work using VoIP. As a result of the staff being distributed to these hospital sites, and the fact the staff would be using the remote office product, this meant it was possible to include those extensions on the IDVR system. This was a technically challenging requirement needing to be fulfilled to allow the service its first steps into VoIP.

From the outset, the provision of IDVR was behind the installation of the Meridian telephone systems. This was because Edinburgh had already gone live by the time the IDVR was included in the contract. However Datapulse flew an engineer to Scotland who visited each of the sites in turn to install the systems.

The service had elected to provide its own hardware for the IDVR software application to be installed on. Whilst in the first instance there was a small issue with elements of the hardware, this was quickly sorted out, and the systems were up and running very smoothly in a very short time.

The dongle-protected IDVR server software sits on a Windows 2000 Professional platform. The service elected to get the largest capacity SCSI hard disks that were currently available, (around 270 Gigabyte disks) thus caching the maximum amount of recordings available for near instantaneous playback.

Two DVD RAM drives provide the means for archiving of recordings. These are written in .wav format as well as database entries so that a full reconstruction can take place in the event of a hard disk failure. The ambulance service currently uses double-sided 5.2Gigabyte DVD-RAM disks, but larger ones are available.

A client session can also run on the server, for administration purposes, and further client sessions can be run from almost any other networked PC running the client software. The IDVR application itself has proved to be very resilient with no failures recorded. The only problems encountered so far have been hardware problems with the service's own servers. As a result of an isolated total hard disk failure, an archive restore was carried out, and the recordings previously made were recovered to the replacement server.

Playback has proved to be very simple, the quality being better than any previous solution tried by the service. The near instantaneous playback of calls, many of them from months previously, means a significant amount of time is saved by not having to wait for tapes to be first located, and then wound on to the relevant place.

The database entries that are employed to search for recordings are also useful, meaning that calls can be searched by operator names, by extension used, by the calling Line Identity of the Caller, by the line used to call in, or even by just the time on a particular day, for instance. Again all these records are available on every PC running the client software, or they can be restricted by a system administrator, meaning that calls on a particular extension, can only be listened to by a particular user. There are many other restrictions and permissions that are available, giving maximum flexibility.

Scottish Ambulance Service's telecoms services manager, Alistair Yell, comments: "We are absolutely delighted with the IDVR systems. It has proved to be a resilient application, and the ease of searching for recordings, even ones of conversations held at our remote hospital locations, has proved to be a winner with our EMDC staff. The fact that we can search and listen to recordings made so long ago, with a delay of literally less than two seconds, is a major benefit, and the call clarity means we are never struggling to hear one or the other side of a conversation."