Last year Leeds Teaching Hospital marked a major milestone with the transfer of patient services to the brand new GBP 220 million Bexley Wing at St James' University Hospital from Cookridge.

Vigilant Technology provides all three of the Leeds Hospitals with 30 day recording using their Xstream video servers. There are 66 terabytes of storage over the three sites, recording up to 144 cameras at Leeds General Infirmary, recording up to 96 cameras at St James' and recording up to 96 cameras at Chapel Allerton. All of the systems can record every single camera at speeds of up to 25 images per second at 4CIF resolution.

Darren Walton of Faber Maunsell, the international consulting company who provided design and project management services for the project, explains there are six hospitals located in and around the city, some of which already have security systems linked to the CCTV monitoring based at Leeds General Infirmary. Darren says "Centralised recording would have required massive bandwidth capacity and cost is obviously an issue."

"By using a separate infrastructure involving leased fibre optic connections, that are diversely routed between different hospitals, this arrangement is designed to provide sufficient bandwidth capacity to cope with future requirements; for instance as we expand the number of IP enabled cameras in the future."

Peter Foy of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust comments "The step-up we've made in our surveillance capability recently has led to approached from Leeds City Council, who want to implement a partnership between us and its 'LeedsWatch' public monitoring scheme so that Council operators can link into some of our cameras covering areas such as hospital roads and car parks."

Vigilant's open platform allowed easy integration with the Cortech Datalog 4 Security Management System to accomplish a totally integrated security management solution. The recorders are physically located in communications equipment rooms at the hospitals; however all have links between each site so that channels can be viewed remotely from other hospitals where necessary.

The Vigilant Xstream IP digital video recording solution offers unmatched flexibility and performance in a cost effective, easy-to-use package.

At the core of Vigilant Xstream is the ability to configure the system to meet the end user's exact needs. Recording at up to 30 (NTSC) or 25 (PAL) frames per second per camera, in standard or high resolution, Vigilant Xstream offers choices unsurpassed in the security industry today.