Credit: The House of Saint Hilarion
Calvert Technologies has boosted the Wi-Fi coverage of South Australian aged care provider The Society of Saint Hilarion for its 176 residents and 300 staff.
Saint Hilarion, which has a villa-styled facility in Fulham and a home in Seaton, offers residential care, community care and respite and enablement care, with staff supported by volunteers.
Calvert Technologies was called in – a support partner of the aged care provider since 2018 and a multi-time winner of WatchGuard Techologies' partner of the year awards – to standardise Saint Hilarion's access points.
The managed services provider (MSP) previously deployed 64 WatchGuard wireless access points for Wi-Fi access back in 2021. In April this year, Calvert Technologies was tasked to refresh its wireless network, bringing in 39 new devices as a result, and took less than four weeks.
“The first step was to shift some of the existing access points from the smaller location to the larger one,” said Calvert Technologies CEO Dean Calvert. “New access points were then deployed in the smaller facility.”
Calvert added that WatchGuard helped in the project by being able to provide the necessary hardware with stock availability "as quickly as they could".
“This enabled us to meet our aggressive timeline as there were safety requirements so we needed to be able to act quickly and have the more robust infrastructure fully functional within a month,” he added.
The new set-up was needed as following the initial deployment, blackspots arose after facility growth, which resulted in poor performance and holes in the aged care provider’s safety and security strategies.
Basements, the chapel and cafes suffered in particular, with staff unable to use necessary data to do their jobs efficiently
Saint Hilarion CEO Vincenzo Libri also said there were difficulties when it came to observation and maintenance as some came from a “range of different vendors”.
“Having dependable Wi-Fi is particularly important for our nursing and support workers,” he said. “They make use of tablet devices on their medical carts to check the identity of residents and ensure they are receiving the correct medications. Being unable to access the network makes this very difficult.”
As a result of the refresh, Saint Hilarion offers three networks — one for staff, another for residents and the third for guests.
Additionally, staff now communicate via Wi-Fi, rather than cellular networks.
“This means that having strong Wi-Fi coverage in all areas is even more important,” Libri added. “If a resident pushes a call bell but that message is not relayed to the relevant staff members handset, it means we may fail to respond in a timely manner.”
