Colour is the key to simplicity for Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust

For any organisation with multiple departments, keeping track of voice and data cabling can quickly become complex, even when they are all in one building. When Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust built a brand new primary care centre, it took the opportunity to address this challenge head-on. Using colour-coded patch panels from 3M, the primary care centre now has a cabling system that not only spans multiple departments, but which makes it possible to tell 'at a glance' which cable belongs where, so it is extremely simple for the Trust to carry out alterations in the future.

Covering primary care and mental health services, Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust is one of the country's largest Primary Care Trusts and has twelve localities under its wing. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Trust is a major investor in improving the healthcare available to the people within the Coventry area.

The Trust was formed in 2002, following the nationwide reorganisation of the NHS. Two NHS organisations, Coventry Healthcare NHS Trust and Coventry Health Authority, ceased to exist and their responsibilities, along with those of former Primary Care Groups, were taken over by Coventry Primary Care Trust. As its name might suggest, the Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust has many of the city's primary care services under its wing, including doctors' surgeries, Surestart, social services, dental and community health.

All these departments or teams were previously located separately and the Trust could see that, by bringing all them under one roof, it had the opportunity to increase efficiency, for example by enabling them to share data, where appropriate, as well as the potential to minimise operating costs. The decision was taken to build a brand new primary care centre at Willenhall, a locality in the South East of Coventry. One of the project's aims was to ensure that each department had efficient voice and data cabling not only to support their individual needs, but simple enough for on-site staff to manage themselves. In other words, the Trust wanted an easy means for staff to be able to, for example, change their phone or data line configuration, without needing to call in technical expertise.