When one of the world's leading children's hospitals went to open public tender for a hospital-wide access control upgrade, Ansador won it on merit against the field. The award landed weeks before London locked down.
The legacy system could not wait. This is how the work got done.
An NHS Foundation Trust children's hospital, treating the most vulnerable patients in the country across an estate of more than forty buildings in central London. The hospital had operated for years on a Granta access control system, originally manufactured by Bewator and inherited through Vanderbilt and now Acre Security. Granta did its job for a long time.
It could not do it for much longer.
The system sat on an ageing RS-485 bus network with little or no IP at the door controllers. Card credential security had fallen behind modern standards. The server platform was approaching obsolescence, with the host operating system nearing end of support. For a live children's hospital, that combination is not a roadmap problem. It is a present-tense risk.
The trust took the right path. It went to formal NHS public tender for an enterprise-grade replacement, appointed an external security consultant to manage the procurement, and invited the field to compete. Every major name in the industry circled.
Ansador won it on merit. What follows is what the trust now operates, and what that has unlocked.
The system Ansador designed and delivered is not a replacement of like-for-like hardware.
It is the connective tissue between the buildings, the people, and the operational decisions the trust now makes every day, every week, and every quarter.
SiPass Integrated. The enterprise-grade access control platform engineered for multi-building, mission-critical estates where resilience, auditability, and integration are non-negotiable.
Every door controller on the network. Every credential transaction logged. Every event timestamped, searchable, and recoverable. Built to integrate with the trust's broader IT ecosystem, not sit beside it.
Multi-technology readers across the hospital so every existing third-party smart card the trust depends on continues to work. With a clear path to modern credential standards as the estate evolves.
Audit-ready evidence generated continuously. Building Safety Act, BS 9991, BS 5839, CQC, fire authority, internal governance. The data is current by default.
Footfall, dwell-time, occupancy and movement patterns across the estate. The data the trust uses to plan, refurbish, deploy resources, and make strategic decisions about the buildings it runs.
One named partner. One accountable contract. One escalation path. Twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.
The work is now in its second half-decade and the relationship has grown alongside the trust's needs. Each phase has built on the last.
The trust ran a full NHS public tender, supervised by an external security consultant, against a competitive field. Ansador's bid was selected on technical merit, delivery credibility, and commercial coherence. Award landed weeks before London entered the first COVID-19 lockdown. The legacy system could not wait. The work began.
Operations Director Paul Smith ran the programme directly. Thirty-plus stakeholders across clinical, IT, estates, security, and facilities. Access protocols rewritten to meet hospital infection-control standards, including full hazmat-grade PPE for engineers entering critical care areas. We instituted additional safeguards proactively, beyond what the contract required, on the principle that the work should be delivered to the standard we would expect if our own children were on those wards. Zero clinical disruption. Zero patient-safety incidents. Migration delivered.
Once the hardware was migrated and the database was clean, the work shifted to operational tuning. Reader performance optimisation. Credential lifecycle management. Integration with adjacent systems the trust runs across IT, HR, and visitor management. Compliance evidence flows began running continuously rather than being assembled at audit. The platform earned its place inside the trust's IT operating model, not alongside it.
The system the trust commissioned as access control is now used for far more than access control. Estate teams use the data to understand how spaces are actually used. Where footfall concentrates. Where patterns are shifting. Where investment should go and where it should not. Compliance evidence is generated continuously. Audit cycles are measured in days, not weeks. The platform is no longer a system the trust runs. It is a data layer the trust runs on.
Off the back of this work, the trust has awarded Ansador the security infrastructure contract for their new specialist cancer facility currently under construction. New build. New standards. Same team. Same standard.
The reason this work matters strategically, and the reason corporate estates teams across healthcare, government, and the private sector are now reframing how they buy security infrastructure, is that the system is generating something the legacy estate could not. Information.
Patterns. Footfall. Occupancy. Anomalies. Compliance evidence. Audit trails. Real-time operational intelligence the trust can act on at the building level, the directorate level, and the estate level. None of these capabilities existed under the legacy architecture. All of them now exist as standard.
"Few contractors could have delivered what Ansador did during COVID. Managing a complex upgrade in a live hospital, with over thirty stakeholders and zero margin for error. They were organised, professional, and completely reliable throughout. We now see them as a long-term partner."Estates Leadership · NHS Foundation Trust Children's Hospital
Compliance and audit obligations across corporate estates have changed beyond recognition in the last five years. The Building Safety Act. Martyn's Law. Evolving British Standards. Cyber requirements. Insurer scrutiny. The expectation now is that evidence is current, retrievable, and defensible at any moment. Not assembled in a panic the week before an audit.
At the same time, the executives running these estates, in healthcare, finance, government, education, hospitality, are being asked to make sharper decisions about space, capital, headcount, and resilience. The data to make those decisions has historically lived in spreadsheets, surveys, and gut feel. It now lives, or should live, in the operational layer of the buildings themselves.
This is the gap Ansador's work closes. Procurement credibility: won fully competed in NHS public tender, supervised by an external consultant. Technical depth: enterprise IP-native platform, integration-ready, designed for the next decade. Programme discipline: delivered through a pandemic without compromising a single clinical operation. Strategic value: the trust now runs on operational intelligence, not just access control.
If you are running an estate that has outgrown its current contractor, a legacy system that is approaching end of life, or a security infrastructure programme where compliance, audit, and strategic estate intelligence now matter more than the hardware on the doors, this is the work we do.
If your estate carries the same kind of compliance burden and operational sensitivity as a teaching hospital, we should talk. Start with a four-minute Maturity Assessment, or book a 30-minute call directly.