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A cure for hospital theft

The Miguel Servet University Hospital in Spain has 1345 beds and 4800 staff. It used to have a serious theft problem because of its open layout and large number of daily visitors. In 2005 they decided to install an IP video-based camera surveillance system which would be manned 24 hours a day. IP video was chosen because it would provide an image capture and recording system that would easily integrate with the existing hospital cabling and IT infrastructure.

Roy Alves, managing director of SCS Distribution, exclusive suppliers of Axis Communications equipment in Africa, commented: "This is an excellent example of technology being used appropriately and extremely effectively. The hospital went from hardly a week passing without a significant loss, to a five-month run of zero loss. Network video was chosen for its flexibility and scalability, and the ease with which it could be introduced in several stages - which is difficult to do with traditional CCTV - and they were even able to include some existing analog cameras using Axis video servers."

Initially, network cameras were installed in the main corridors to monitor all the hospital entry and exit points and connected to the building's network. In the second stage, a dedicated VLAN (virtual local area network) was created within the main network. A storage server was then installed to store the video feeds sent by the cameras.

Monitoring the more troublesome areas of the building minimised incidents by discouraging theft and enabling investigation of any incident that could not be prevented. Images are managed using Milestone's XProtect recording software (also distributed by SCS), which provides monitoring, search, archiving and evidence-generation facilities.

Alves adds: "It is very gratifying when a system has such an immediate and quantifiable effect as in Miguel Servet case, as well as adding the benefits of being able to monitor and respond quickly to non-criminal events, in some cases preventing incidents developing into crises."

The system currently has 18 Axis network cameras and a further six analog cameras connected using Axis video servers.

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