St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts), England’s oldest hospital and part of the London NHS Trust, will start trialling the latest-generation 802.11n WiFi technology in its accident and emergency (A&E) department on 1 June.

The trial will deliver wireless voice communications and radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment tracking to 75 clinicians and administrators.

“Clinicians were complaining about poor communications and the fact that they often had to walk around the wards to find people,” said Doug Howe, head of client services at the directorate of finance and ICT at the Royal London Hospital.

The wireless network will also support Philips’ Aeroscout asset tracking solution, which embeds passive RFID tags in medical equipment to make sure it can be properly located.

“It tracks high-value medical equipment and small devices that people often stow away in drawers around the hospital, and which can take weeks to find,” said Howe.

The trial covers less than five per cent of the Trust’s hospital floor space, but Howe says the Aerohive test network can be quickly and easily expanded to cover new £1bn facilities due to be added to Barts and the Royal London hospital by 2012.

“We are consolidating three sites into two and, in effect, building a new hospital, so we wanted to try a new technology. The idea is to gain support among medical staff,” said Howe.

The £300,000 trial has been implemented by HP’s professional services division and Sigma Systems Integration.

A total of 77 802.11n-enabled access points have been installed around the A &E department.

Howe says Barts is looking at ways to use the faster data rates offered by Aerohive’s 802.11n APs to support video streaming, live teleconferencing and other web-based communications between medical teams.