THE CHALLENGE The Western Cape Department of Health in South Africa needs reliable communication systems and processes in place to notify key personnel of time-critical situations. More specifically, the department’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) relies heavily on its paging system to notify physicians, nurses, administrative staff, ambulance drivers, and other staff members when they need to respond. With six call centers located throughout the Western Cape province, operators used a wide- area paging system to dispatch messages to 4,500 contacts. The Department of Health soon discovered that staff were receiving multiple or unreadable corrupted messages because of overlapping transmitters. Additionally, when the system went down, there was no backup system in place, and message

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