The facility was designed, built, financed, and will be maintained under a private-public partnership. The agreement between William Osler Health Centre and The Healthcare Infrastructure Company of Canada (THICC) provides public delivery of health care in a facility designed and constructed to exact specifications determined by William Osler Health Centre and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
THICC, which provided the capital costs for construction and which will maintain the facility for the next 25 years, is a partnership amongst EllisDon Corporation, Borealis Infrastructure Management and Carillion Canada Inc.

Taking on the role of security director for the facility was John Fodor, but before Fodor wasn’t even hired when a team of technical security experts was assembled to create the fully-integrated security system from the ground up for the hospital that spans 1.3 million square feet serving a growing community.
Recently Canadian Security sat down with roundtable sponsor, Siemens Building Technologies, Fodor and the rest of the team that helped build this state-of-the-art security department.

CSM: What did you think of this new model for building hospitals?
John Fodor: A lot of hospitals do have outsourced security services so I never thought it would be that much different. What I did find interesting was the amount of technology the company was willing to put in place. The company had a vested interest to make sure that all the systems were specified with adequate staffing to meet the service level agreements, so I found they were willing to invest more in the technology as well as the resources to make sure the service level agreements were fulfilled.

CSM: Under this model, Carillion is given benchmarks to meet certain response times. Was that different for you as well?
Fodor: It’s different in that it’s all laid out in the service level agreements. There is a penalty structure that comes with it and so certain benchmarks have to be met. So response times to emergencies — if we don’t meet those there is the potential we could be fined for not responding in that response time. For any type of code we have to be there within five minutes. In that respect we had to make sure adequate officers are on duty at any one time and we have to position them so that if there is an emergency somebody will get there in the specified time.

CSM: Siemens was awarded the contract to provide the overall technology?
Joe Caranci: Correct. The desire was there for an integrated approach, especially with CCTV and access control and to have it dovetail with a lot of the things that ESA provided for us. It was an interesting position in that we were given a target to hit in terms of a budget number. We were given performance specifications, which took two forms — one was the building and one was functional, but other than that we had a lot of flexibility in terms of the products we chose, as long as we could meet those functional specifications.
We were able to choose some fairly high-end product to make sure we could meet the performance specs. At the end of the day, Ellis Don has a vested interest in making sure that the technology is not just the lowest cost for construction, but that it will last with limited cost in terms of maintenance.

CSM: Is this the first hospital in Ontario built under this model?
Caranci: Royal Ottawa and William Osler were pretty much built and designed simultaneously. The Royal Ottawa Hospital was somewhat smaller in scope, but a little more intense on the security side.

CSM: It’s not very often that you are asked to design a hospital security system from the blueprint stage. What’s that like?
Caranci: Going into a health-care facility, a lot of times it is to expand on an existing platform with systems put in place as a result of tenders that were issued for three or four doors or small camera systems or migrating from analogue to digital. This was an opportunity to go in at the green field stage and put systems in from scratch. The team we put together to deliver it probably had lot more fun than we did. We planned it out on paper but there is a lot that happened between planning it out on paper and making it happen.

CSM: Can you say what the budget was?
Caranci: No, I cannot but I know it is one of the largest security projects in Ontario.

CSM: How do you begin to plan out a project like this? How do you choose product and technology partners?
Caranci: When you look in the security industry a lot of companies have one product they go forward with. At Siemens we have a little more flexibility in terms of what we can choose. That gives us the ability to look at an application and say, based on the size of the project and the kind of technology and what we’re trying to accomplish what’s the best fit? At the time — realize that this was 2001 — we didn’t want to go with a 100 per cent IP-based system. It was a little too early to make sure we could get that in and working properly but we knew we wanted to go with technology that was IP-enabled and moving towards that realm. So we went with a form of Nice on the video recording side, and a  form of C-Cure on the access control side. Their product tends to be fairly close to leading edge in terms of the technology and certainly considered leading edge in terms of being IP-enabled.

CSM: Is that when you call in someone like Clayton with ESA?
Caranci: Correct. We had worked together prior to this project. When we had the opportunity to bring in nurse call and wandering patient control and an infant abduction system ESA was a partner we already knew and we found to be a natural fit. They had a major piece of the action in terms of getting the integration to work because the nurse call stations are where a lot of the video gets displayed. Integration is just a tool — you want to enable the manpower side to react faster. For example, if a wandering patient goes through a door they shouldn’t go through, you want the video to kick in, the alarms to go off you want to notify staff — a lot of that communications piece is driven through nurse call, so we needed a strong partner to make that happen as well.