Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) is an independent charity that aims to provide free ‘home away from home’ accommodation at hospitals across the UK, enabling families to stay close to their child and maintain a degree of normal family life. Its new house at Birmingham Children’s Hospital is its largest purpose-built accommodation facility, providing 60 en-suite bedrooms and communal cooking facilities.

“The aim of our homes is to enable families to lead as normal a life as is possible, offering them respite and a relaxed environment away from home,” says Anne Roberts, Head of Operations and Development at RMHC. “Of prime importance is that families feel comfortable and safe, and of course security has a key part to play in this.

“With its city centre location, the main security challenge is one of access control. We need to ensure that families can access the house around the clock, while ensuring that it remains closed to any-would be intruders,” she explains. “Chubb was appointed on competitive tender as it offered a suitable solution at a reasonable cost.”

To protect the building and its residents, Chubb installed an integrated CCTV, access control and intruder alarm system, which is simultaneously managed and controlled from one central point thanks to its Monitor AFx software. The system comprises almost 30 CCTV cameras both internally and externally, with images from the cameras recorded for review in the event of an incident. Chubb also fitted 20 access control doors, featuring a card reader system.

Chubb was the only provider to offer the system, which provides a clear benefit to the house, as Anne continues: “When arriving at the home, families are issued with access cards for the main entry, similar to those found in hotels,” she says. “Chubb programmed the cards to integrate fully with the system on the internal doors. Only a single card is required, to make gaining entry to the house around the clock as simple and straightforward as possible for the families.

“With as many as 60 families staying, sometimes for just a few days, sometimes on a longer-term basis, the system provides added peace of mind that only those who should be accessing the building are doing so. The system does all that it set out to do, and we are very pleased,” Anne concludes.

Chubb access control and visitor management systems are designed to control access for employees, contractors and visitors to sites of all sizes in all environments. Utilising multiple technologies such as swipe cards, proximity tokens, PIN entry keypads and sophisticated biometric devices, systems can be designed around existing hardware to provide an effective solution for a single site, or multiple sites across an estate.