Tunstall Healthcare: telecare through the analogue switch-off

Tunstall’s telecare estate still runs, in material part, on the analogue telephone network. BT is switching that network off. The programme is not a single project. It is a portfolio that has to land while monitoring for people who depend on it continues.

The work includes ISDN to SIP, Smartnumbers onto a next-generation platform, and a network refresh across three data centres. The Department of Health and Social Care is in the room. So are BT, Hitachi, Verizon, and a hard national deadline.

This is director-led programme management of the kind RAID is built for. Every line in the room has to hold: sponsor, users, technology, vendors, operations, finance, risk and change. Miss one, and the landing does not hold. A RAID log does not make the decision. People who have seen the failure modes do.

The engagement is current: Delivery Change Manager, from March 2025. It is the same pattern as the rest of the work — trading floors that could not take an outage, a digital estate that had to come off a data centre in Guernsey, a Windows refresh that was already failing. The work is treated as a chore until it is in trouble. Then someone senior is asked to recover it. Better to put that person on it first.