IT supply for hospitals, clinics and diagnostic centres

By phasing to clinical areas and agreeing access windows with the people who actually control them. We walk the site with department and ward managers rather than only with procurement, because they know when a bay is genuinely free and when a corridor cannot be obstructed. Disruptive work — drilling, containment installation, anything generating dust or noise — is scheduled into agreed windows, frequently at night or during known low-activity periods. It makes the installation longer in calendar terms than a commercial equivalent, and we quote it that way honestly rather than promising a timeline that assumes access we will not get.

Drives are wiped to a documented overwrite standard before anything leaves your premises, and you receive a certificate recording the machine, its serial and the method used. For healthcare that certificate matters considerably more than any residual value in the hardware, because it is what demonstrates you handled patient data properly at disposal. Where a drive has failed and cannot be reliably wiped, we physically destroy it rather than removing it from site, and document that instead — a dead drive is still readable to anyone determined enough.

Start from what has to happen during an outage rather than from a target number of minutes. For most clinical records and imaging systems the genuine minimum is enough runtime for a controlled shutdown, which prevents the database corruption that repeated unclean shutdowns cause. Beyond that, the question is which systems must stay actively usable while the generator starts and stabilises — typically admissions, pharmacy dispensing and anything supporting an active procedure. We size those separately and at higher runtime rather than applying one figure across the estate, because protecting everything to the highest standard is rarely affordable and rarely necessary.

Longer than a commercial premises, because of how incidents surface in healthcare. Complaints, insurance matters and safeguarding concerns frequently come to light weeks after the event rather than within days, so a fifteen-day retention that would be adequate for retail leaves a hospital without footage exactly when it is asked for. Sixty to ninety days is a more realistic specification for wards, entrances and pharmacy areas. That is largely a storage cost rather than a system redesign, which is why it is worth deciding deliberately at specification stage.

Yes, and it should be a requirement rather than an option. Patient and visitor WiFi sharing infrastructure with clinical systems is a genuine exposure, and it is startlingly common in hospitals that grew their network organically over a decade. We segment clinical, administrative, guest and surveillance traffic onto separate VLANs with controlled routing between them, configured at installation. Retrofitting segmentation onto a flat hospital network later is possible but considerably more disruptive, which is an argument for doing it during any planned network work rather than as a standalone project.