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Groote Schuur Hospital ­upgrades to ­biometrics

Groote Schuur Hospital is a teaching hospital located in Cape Town. Founded before the Second World War, the hospital gained an international status in 1967 when the first human heart transplant took place, conducted by Dr Christiaan Barnard.

In 2013, the hospital took another step into the future, when it upgraded its RFID access cards and tags to include fingerprint biometric access to certain areas. The Granding biometric devices were supplied by Castle Access Control Systems and installed by Keep Electronics.

Keep’s Bryan Fitchat says the hospital realised it needed to improve the access security to certain areas within the hospital. Areas such as the pharmacy, stock rooms and services areas, among others required better control of who was able to come and go. It’s easy to lend someone a tag or card and allow them access to sensitive areas, hence biometrics provided the answer.

Michael Pass runs the maintenance and access division of Groote Schuur. He says biometrics was the answer as nobody can lend or steal a fingerprint. This would provide the hospital with a clear indication of who accessed sensitive areas and when, with the assurance that unauthorised people could not get in.

Pass says Groote Schuur would have liked to install biometrics throughout the hospital, but did not have the budget to upgrade the entire access control system in one phase. It therefore went out to tender for phase one of the project to secure specific sensitive areas.

Warwick Forde, director at Castle Access Control Systems, says the project was not simply about swapping old readers for biometric devices. Other areas of the hospital still used card and tag access so the biometric readers would have to be able to read biometrics and cards, and even have an option to ask for a password in highly secure areas.

Forde says before the Granding biometric readers were installed, Castle had to work with the technical team in China to adapt the readers to read different generations of HID access cards and communicate these to the existing Softcon system. The hospital has installed a number of HID card readers over the years and have a variety of access cards in use. The biometric readers had to be capable of reading each version of the cards as well as the new fingerprints.

Once the 150 readers were customised to Groote Schuur’s requirements, Fitchat adds that it took only three weeks to install the devices and get the hospital running on the new system. Groote Schuur’s maintenance department does its own support, which is easy with the reliable Granding access products.

Further biometric units will be installed in phases in the future as budget becomes available.

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