ABBOTSFORD REGIONAL HOSPITAL & CANCER CENTRE — NURSE CALL REPLACEMENT

Project info

The Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre (ARHCC) has played a key role in delivering healthcare to over 600,000 residents across the Fraser Valley since its opening in 2008. As part of its ongoing commitment to providing life-saving care, ARHCC embarked on a comprehensive upgrade of its aging nurse call system.

A nurse call system is an essential communications tool that enables patients to alert nursing staff when assistance is needed. These systems play a vital role in patient safety by facilitating rapid emergency responses, tracking call activity, and prioritizing urgent needs. Comprised of call buttons, notification devices, and central consoles, the nurse call system is designed to streamline patient care and improve overall healthcare efficiency.

Through the Nurse Call Replacement Project, ARHCC reinforces its commitment to safe, high-quality care and effective medical response.

OUR SCOPE

Our scope of work involved replacing the aging nurse call system with a more advanced and reliable solution. This included upgrades to dome lights, patient stations, bathroom pull cords, staff consoles, staff duty stations, and system infrastructure wiring. Each patient station now features specialized buttons, such as Code Blue and Staff Emergency call buttons, to support rapid staff response.

A major infrastructure improvement was the upgrade of the hall bus – the backbone of the system. It uses a daisy-chain method to link patient stations and devices to the central communications network. As part of this process, the backbone was updated and fully integrated to create a cohesive system. This integration unifies call event responses across disparate hospital locations through a central interface.

Key system enhancements also included upgrades to the communications rooms, network switches, and station gateways that drive the nurse call system. Each gateway supports two loops of network and power, connecting to the dome light hallway bus throughout the facility. Since each dome light is individually connected to a gateway, the number of supported connections per gateway is limited. This required careful planning and execution to ensure the system’s reliability and capacity. The work was completed in stages, enabling us to upgrade the old hardware without disrupting the hospital’s day-to-day operations.

One of the primary challenges of this project was installing the new system while keeping the hospital fully operational, due to the life-safety nature of the nurse call system. To mitigate any risks, we set up infection control tents equipped with polyplastic sheeting and magnets. Negative air vacuum systems were also utilized in sensitive zones, such as inpatient care and cancer treatment areas, to maintain critical air quality standards. This project was particularly challenging due to the complexity of working within an active healthcare environment.

collaboration & success

Thanks to the collaboration between our Security & Healthcare Technology team and our Planning Team, we successfully executed the project with minimal disruption. A key factor in this success was our ability to highlight the importance of upgrading the system before failure occurred. This accomplishment reinforces our team’s expertise and ability to deliver high-quality results in complex healthcare environments. It ensures the hospital remains fully equipped to continue providing critical care to its patients.