Children’s Hospice South West uses LifeSize HD Video to Reduce Travel Expenses, Keep Teams Focused on the Kids One of the UK’s best known charities, CHSW supports life limited children and their families, uses HD video communications to save money, reduce travel CHALLENGE SOLUTION RESULTS With senior staff spending up to 60% of their days traveling to the organization’s various facilities, CHSW needed a communications tool that could provide face-to-face communication with dispersed work teams. After thorough demonstrations of the different manufacturer’s video products, CHSW implemented a combination of LifeSize® Team MP™ and LifeSize® Express™systems among the organization’s various regional locations. CHSW is expecting a quick ROI (18 months) with a significant reduction in travel and travel-related expenses. Communications among all team members have improved, resulting in more productive use of time and monies to better support the children and their families. Organization Children’s Hospice South West, Barnstaple, United Kingdom Children’s Hospice South West, a registered charity in the UK, provides palliative, respite, end of life and bereavement care for life limited children and their families across South West England. With over 1,000 children diagnosed with life threatening illnesses in the region, the hospice’s support is vital. CHSW was set up by Jill and Eddie Farwell in 1991 after the couple spent many years travelling to Helen House in Oxford, one of the only hospices within hundreds of miles at the time, with their own two life limited children. The organization currently has two locations in the region -- Little Bridge House in North Devon and Charlton Farm in North Somerset. Children’s Hospice South West’s £5 million Precious Lives Appeal has been set up to fund the build of a much needed third hospice. This facility, Little Harbour, will be built at Porthpean, St Austell in Cornwall and plans to open its doors to the children and families of the area in 2011. Children’s Hospice South West’s Little Bridge House facility, which opened in 1995, is a beautiful and homely stonebuilt building in North Devon. It is a peaceful and relaxing environment surrounded by lovely gardens that provide plenty of places to play and enjoy the sunshine. A CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Transcript
Children’s Hospice South West uses LifeSize HD Video to Reduce Travel Expenses, Keep Teams Focused on the Kids
One of the UK’s best known charities, CHSW supports life limited children and their families, uses HD video communications to save money, reduce travel
C H A L L E N G E S O L U T I O N R E S U L T S
With senior staff spending up to 60% of their days traveling to the organization’s various facilities, CHSW needed a communications tool that could provide face-to-face communication with dispersed work teams.
After thorough demonstrations of the different manufacturer’s video products, CHSW implemented a combination of LifeSize® Team MP™ and LifeSize® Express™systems among the organization’s various regional locations.
CHSW is expecting a quick ROI (18 months) with a significant reduction in travel and travel-related expenses. Communications among all team members have improved, resulting in more productive use of time and monies to better support the children and their families.
OrganizationChildren’s Hospice South West, Barnstaple, United Kingdom
Children’s Hospice South West, a registered charity in the UK, provides palliative, respite, end of life and bereavement care for life limited children and their families across South West England. With over 1,000 children diagnosed with life threatening illnesses in the region, the hospice’s support is vital.
CHSW was set up by Jill and Eddie Farwell in 1991 after the couple spent many years travelling to Helen House in Oxford, one of the only hospices within hundreds of miles at the time, with their own two life limited children.
The organization currently has two locations in the region -- Little Bridge House in North Devon and Charlton Farm in North Somerset. Children’s Hospice South West’s £5 million Precious Lives Appeal has been set up to fund the build of a much needed third hospice. This facility, Little Harbour, will be built at Porthpean, St Austell in Cornwall and plans to open its doors to the children and families of the area in 2011.
Children’s Hospice South West’s Little Bridge House facility, which opened in 1995, is a beautiful and homely stonebuilt
building in North Devon. It is a peaceful and relaxing environment surrounded by lovely gardens that provide
plenty of places to play and enjoy the sunshine.
A CUSTOmER SUCCESS STORy
Challenge
With a growing staff of roughly 160, including care staff, senior managers, administrators and fundraising teams, constant and real-time communication is essential. But as building plans for the new facility in Cornwall began to accelerate, staff members, especially senior managers, were spending valuable time and effort travelling between locations.
An analysis of one manager’s travel over a three month period illustrated that 67 journeys were taken -- 45 to Charlton Farm and 22 to the new facility in Cornwall. With either location resulting in a 3 hour round trip journey from Little Bridge, some 17 hours per week were being spent traveling to and from locations. Travel costs were estimated to be in excess of £50,000 annually and up to 60% of most working days were wasted on travel for members of senior staff. CHSW needed a better, most cost-effective way to communicate.
The organization’s IT group looked at various audio conferencing services, but as such a people-oriented organization, audio-only calling just wasn’t a viable option. Children’s Hospice South West needed a communications tool that could foster immersive, face-to-face communication, rivaled only by in-person meetings.
Solution
After thorough testing and demonstrations from all major video conferencing vendors, CHSW decided that the HD solution from LifeSize best met their needs and the charity soon began a full deployment.
LifeSize® Team MP™ and LifeSize® Express™ systems were installed in the Little Bridge and Charlton Farm locations as well as in their Cornwall fundraising offices. Almost immediately, the systems were up and running. Culturally, CHSW employees were quite pleased with the systems. The hospice’s Chief Executive sent an email out to all staff highlighting the benefits of video and informal training sessions were set up so that staff could spend time learning how to use them.
“The deciding factors in choosing LifeSize were cost, quality, ease of use and bandwidth utilization,” said Steve Benson, IT Coordinator for CHSW. “The built-in bridge, document sharing capabilities and compactness of the system were also key. Additionally, the LifeSize Express system, which can be easily mounted on a trolley for mobility, allows us to move systems to various rooms within each location.”
Key requirements for CHSW:
Superior quality: HD audio and video for a seamless, in-room feel between locations.
Flexibility: Easy to deploy, simple to use, with built-in collaboration tools.
Unmatched price performance: As a charity, the organization’s first priority is the children it serves. A new technology investment must make sense financially.
“We are expecting that our costs associated with the LifeSize implementation will be recouped in less than 18 months. ”
– S T E V E B E N S O N , I T CO O R D I N aTO R , CH S W
Results
Since the implementation of LifeSize high definition video communications systems, Children’s Hospice South West has seen lasting benefits -- not only in the reduction of expenses and travel, but by allowing staff members more time to do what they do best -- care for children.
Weekly, monthly and ad hoc departmental meetings for teams like fundraising, community groups and care policies now meet on a regular basis. The care clinical governance, a group of doctors, nurses, administrators and care staff, now have a monthly conference which can last up to 3 hours at a time.
“Meetings over LifeSize were just natural from the start,” said Benson. “Our staff has caught on to this technology much quicker than expected.”
As for technical issues, each location has identified a designated ‘expert’ user, who can troubleshoot any problems with network or navigation that may arise.
The IT group also created an on-line booking process by utilizing a program in Microsoft® Outlook™ to make booking of the LifeSize equipment and conference rooms simple and easy. The charity has also devised a way to calculate travel saved by using video. By requiring the user to input the location to which they are dialing (and hence, not traveling to), the program keeps record of the travel miles saved with each conference call.
“We are expecting that our upfront, one-off costs associated with the LifeSize implementation will be recouped in less than 18 months,” Benson continued. “Video conferencing solutions cannot, and should not, be seen as a total replacement for face to face meetings. But the picture and voice quality is so sufficiently good that this technology should now be actively considered as a viable cost effective proposition for organizations with dispersed locations.”
Experience Communication in High Definition
Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. July 2009. Information contained in this document is preliminary and subject to change without notice.
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