Foresight is a wonderful attribute and, luckily for us, King George IV and the Duke of Wellington were nothing if not seers of some repute. Back in 1829 these royal visionaries summoned a distinguished group of patrons – both ecclesiastical and secular – to help in establishing King’s College London (one of the founding colleges, in fact, of what is now the University of London). The ultimate goal was to promote a university education encompassing traditional and modern studies. In hindsight, such a plan was little short of a masterstroke.
Today, King’s stands tall alongside the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge as one of the most highly respected seats of learning and research in the UK. Indeed, the College now plays host to over 16,000 undergraduate and post-graduate students studying everything from biomedical sciences and medicine through to the law, humanities and health and life sciences.
An essential and celebrated part of King’s College is one of its relative ‘newcomers’. The Institute of Psychiatry was merged with the College in August 1997, and provides post-graduate education and research not only in psychiatry, but also psychology and allied disciplines – including clinical neurology.
Spread over 11 different buildings on the De Crespigny Park site at Denmark Hill, south east London, the Institute is a world-renowned centre of excellence for Government and privately-funded research into psychiatric diseases such as depression, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. In addition, it plays host to a dedicated facility – designated The National Addiction Centre – carrying out studies concentrating on drug dependency, and supports 56 undergraduate and 380 post-graduate students.
Given that much of the Institute’s research is top secret, controlling access to its disparate buildings – located on a seven acre site that’s shared with the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust – takes on an added importance. After all, funding organisations including the Wellcome Trust must be sure that confidentiality is maintained at all times.
In the past, there have been attempted break-ins at The National Addiction Centre on the (mistaken) premise that it’s nothing more than a drug store. In fact, there are no drugs in the building at all. Added to that, mentally ill people are not always fully aware of what they’re doing or where they’re going, so a secure facility is paramount.
Incidents like attempted break-ins have weighed heavily on the minds of the site services team and, little more than a year after the Institute joined forces with King’s College, a rolling replacement programme for the security systems became the team’s number one priority.
Security and site services manager Neil Thomas takes up the story. “The site is a sprawling mix of new and older buildings [there are 11 buildings in all], with public meeting rooms, research laboratories, general office space and a staff and visitor car parking area. We also have one secure ultra-clean research facility where only eight or nine members of staff are allowed access.” When it came to access control, there was a very basic problem that had to be overcome. Initially, the various Institute buildings were served by a hardware-only system using conventional magnetic stripe cards. This set-up, though, had a fundamental flaw in that issued cards couldn’t have their access rights terminated, thus site security was open to compromise. In addition, the car parking area was on a separate system operated by a different card. Far from ideal, then.
What Neil Thomas really wanted was a fully-integrated access control solution across all the buildings. Having joined forces with premises manager Ian Armitage in considering a number of possible solutions, Thomas finally opted for Feedback Data’s Microtrak system.
The initial installation covered three doors in the main building, together with the car park and five doors in highly-restricted research areas. Although the user population remains relatively small, the system has grown significantly since it was first implemented. How it works in practice is best illustrated by a closer examination of The David Goldberg Centre, the Institute’s newest building.
Accessing The David Goldberg Centre
Built at a cost of GB pound 15 million (with the help of funding from The Wellcome Trust), The David Goldberg Centre for Health Services Research was opened just last month by Professor Louis Appleby, the National Director for Mental Health. Its raison d’etre is to provide a strong evidence base upon which to improve clinical practice and mental health policy. With this in mind, the four-storey building has two ‘wings’ either side of a main reception. One plays host to seminar rooms, the other to paper-based research rooms and office space together accommodating over 100 members of staff.
A Microtrak card reader has been installed at both the main and side entrances, as well as the two doors leading from the main reception to either wing and even in the lifts. To gain access, a member of staff would simply swipe his or her card through the readers in the tried-and-tested fashion. That said, this system is a little more sophisticated than most in terms of its user group settings.
“The system has allowed us to tailor who goes where and when,” adds Neil Thomas. “Most staff can gain entry to all the building entrances, not just those at The David Goldberg Centre, likewise across-the-board access is programmed for the Centre’s seminar rooms. Access to the Centre’s upper floors is restricted to Health Services Research Centre staff, though, so any unauthorised person that tries to go up a floor or two by swiping their card through the lift readers will be prevented from doing so.” Access is monitored from the security reception room where the photocards are produced and details logged about a given individual on a central database that now presides over a 2000-strong card user population across the Institute. The system includes a badge printing facility that automatically stores a photograph of the badge holder, creates the badge and then passes the appropriate access rights for a given individual into the access control software. In this way, the badges are immediately operational.
What about the logistics behind the card access system? In essence, the software in the security reception room of the main Institute of Psychiatry building sends the access rights of a cardholder to the Microtrak access system. This information is then transported to the area controllers, and from there it is sent electronically to the door controllers.
“Microtrak logs every entrance made, and can be used to ‘follow’ people around the building,” states Thomas. “In our case, the beauty of the system is that it picks out patterns of entrance and attempted entrance. We can pinpoint unusual trends of attempted access to secure research areas over, say, a three-month period, and then question a person about his or her motives for doing so.” Thomas and site services supervisor Bob Usher can also set doors to open between specified time profiles. Any member of staff could gain entry to any of The Institute’s buildings between 9.00 am and 6.00 pm, for example, but between 6.00 pm and 9.00 am the following morning access can be restricted to departmental members.
“We can allow an individual access rights from one day up to any length of time,” adds Neil Thomas. “In addition, if there’s a fault on any door the Microtrak software will flag this up. Similarly, any door ‘lock’ can be released from the operations room”.
Have there been any problems with the access system? “To begin with it kept on crashing,” says Thomas, “but that wasn’t because of the software. The equipment we were running it on was simply too old. Since the upgrade, everything has been fine.”
Camera tactics
With 11 buildings to monitor CCTV provision is crucial. There are 20 Panasonic digital FIT colour cameras, supplied and installed by Camrascan of Peterborough. Offering pan, tilt and zoom functions as standard, these cameras watch over the main external entrances (there is no internal coverage at present, but the plan is to expand the network over the next two years so that there are 40 cameras, some of which will be internal). As part of the new installation, Camrascan also upgraded the receivers to BBV telemetry.
Some of the cameras are in new housings, some in old. Either way, the decision to ‘go digital’ has been of great benefit. P24 C V P22 A Mitsubishi digital matrix – identical to that being used as part of Stansted Airport’s CCTV set-up, the only other such installation of its kind in the UK – is being used to help with archiving of images, while the images presented to the manned guarding teams are, in the words of Neil Thomas, “blur free at very high speeds”. All images are currently viewed from a couple of 17″ monitors. That doesn’t sound overly comprehensive, but again the upgrade will take in monitoring provision.
Very often on a site like this one it’s reasonable to expect a substantial control room with banks of CCTV screens and only one or two operators. However, Neil Thomas’ philosophy appears to be based on ‘reporting by exception’.
The integration of the CCTV and access control systems means that any critical incidents will be made immediately apparent to the guarding team. In practice, every time someone swipes a card through the access control system the images are sent back to the monitor in the main reception area (one in-house guard is on site during the day, with two monitoring and/or patrolling at night to offer a 24-7, year-round support).
At the front desk, the guard(s) can view all door activity, but cannot edit or add any details. All the images are archived direct to CD for possible retrieval at a later date. A set-up that appears to be working extremely well.
Looking to the future
Neil Thomas is bullishly confident that the access control system will cope with any additional demands that might be placed on it in the future as the on-site security provision is extended. “The system performs reliably and it’s well supported,” claims Thomas. This is a manager who needs to know that the security systems are as good as they can be, given that he has a great deal more to worry about than merely controlling access to buildings (his department is also responsible for basic facilities management, catering and cleaning management and general administration).
Such ‘multi-tasking’ seems to be an increasingly common thread pervading the management side of the security equation. The question is whether or not it might lead to a dilution of the security function? Certainly, the industry must use all of its tried-and-trusted negotiating powers to avoid a scenario where the manager’s role is at best diminished, at worst lost in a myriad of other contractual responsibilities.
