Case Study: Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust achieves seamless, secure mobile healthcare with HPE Aruba Networking

Aruba enables seamless mobile healthcare services at one of the largest hospitals in South West England

Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust, a major provider in South West England serving up to two million people with 6,500 staff across 40 wards and 200 departments, needed to make clinical systems truly mobile to support a move toward paper-lite records. The Trust faced a hostile wireless environment (a large, complex building with heavy pipework and medical electronics), 80+ clinical systems, thousands of differing devices (Trust-owned and BYOD), and strict data-security and access-control requirements for staff, patients and visitors.

Aruba delivered a standards-based wired and wireless platform—530 access points, two mobility controllers, AirWave management, Adaptive Radio Network and ClearPass—for scalable, secure campus-wide connectivity and BYOD onboarding. The deployment provides reliable Wi‑Fi in challenging spaces, context-based security and simpler troubleshooting, supports roughly 2,500 daily mobile devices, enabled many medical applications to go mobile, improved patient experience scores, and created a flexible platform for future IoT and mobile-health initiatives.

Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust

Rob Harder

Head of IT infrastructure and Support Services