Justin Looper, is a network engineer in the unified communications team, where he deals with telephony issues that are not so easy to fix. Justin joined the CUH family in 2013 and here he tells us more about his time at CUH.
What is your name and your role in our hospitals?
Hi, I'm Justin Looper and I'm a network engineer in the unified communications team.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
Every day is a challenge. There are the usual day to day activities but equally there are very interesting issues that are not so easy to fix.
These harder to fix issues are the ones that I love to get involved in.
How did you come to work at CUH? Did you work elsewhere before joining the CUH team?
I started working at CUH straight out of college for a company called August Computers, I was installing all new PC hardware that was ordered by the trust. However, I moved from there to consulting in IT. After that I moved onto a few places outside of the Trust for about a year before coming back to CUH.
Tell us a bit about your CUH journey.
I joined CUH in 2013 and spent some time in IT before it was outsourced working on mostly PC deployment and support. Moving on from there I joined the Estates IT department providing application support for the estates departments and from there joined the voice services team (now known as unified communications).
Where did you train?
I took a course called IPro level 3 at college that included modules from accredited authorities such as CompTIA. I continued to learn as time went on but focused more on telephony and networks.
What does a usual day look like for you?
We deal with issues that range from a standard issue with a handset, such as faulty cabling or hardware issues, all the way up to complex routing or infrastructure issues. So a usual day can be fixing phone faults, supporting customers with phone IVR’s and investigating mind popping issues that make no sense until you fix it. Don’t get me wrong, that’s what I love about this job, there is always something to test your mind.
Tell us about a case study/experience at CUH that really stands out to you.
We dealt with an issue relatively recently, where callers would sound like they were underwater. It was complex because it was difficult to replicate and could affect, from one handset, 1 in 30 calls, or for a lot of people calling, it could happen multiple times a day due to the overall number of calls.
The issue ultimately required our supplier to get involved, but turned out to be a singular faulty card in one of our older systems.
Upon taking that faulty card out of the equation, the issue cleared up. But that took a couple of weeks to tie down. There were multiple factors such as systems, how the call is presented to the trust, whether they were internal or external (or both), how the calls flowed between all the elements of the infrastructure - it felt good to resolve that one.
How do you feel your role benefits our patients?
Every department in the Trust is a gear in a massive machine. My role in unified communications is no different. The telephone system plays a critical role in communication from the small to the large departments, as well as emergency and risk to life services.
Without a working telephony system, patient care would be severely impacted, especially in an emergency setting. So, my role is super important and I'm happy to be able to fulfil it for as long as I have.
