The True Cost of Poor Healthcare Connectivity

Healthcare connectivity shapes how easily people can communicate, access information and complete routine work. When connections are unreliable, staff must spend time managing interruptions alongside their existing responsibilities. Understanding poor connectivity in healthcare starts with those everyday experiences.

As part of a wider healthcare digital infrastructure strategy, reliable connectivity helps support communication, information access and day-to-day operations across a healthcare estate.

Cellnex UK’s The True Cost: Healthcare report examines this through research conducted by Censuswide among 500 UK healthcare professionals. Fieldwork took place in June 2025, covering hospitals, general practice, ambulance services and outpatient settings, including community care homes and pharmacies.

The findings offer a starting point for healthcare leaders reviewing where their premises, healthcare digital infrastructure and digital systems make work more difficult.

Why Healthcare Connectivity Matters Across the Estate and Hospital Connectivity Planning

A connectivity review needs to reflect how a building is used throughout the day. Staff move between departments, work away from desks and use different devices for different tasks. Hospital mobile coverage also matters in places where people take a break or contact someone outside work.

For example, an estates colleague might need to receive a call in a basement plant room, while an administrator accesses an appointment system upstairs. Together, these experiences illustrate why healthcare digital infrastructure requirements often vary across the same estate. A strong connection at reception says little about either experience.

How Unreliable Connectivity Disrupts Everyday Work

Survey respondents reported losing an average of 31 minutes each day to poor connectivity. The practical concern is the repeated interruption: waiting for access, retrying a task or finding another way to communicate can break the flow of a working day.

The report also records 62% reporting disruption to communication with colleagues and patients. For leaders assessing their own estate, that makes communication a useful place to investigate. Ask staff which calls or messages fail, where it happens and what they do next.

Record these experiences alongside technical measurements. A slow application could involve Wi-Fi, its underlying network, the device or the application itself. Treating every delay as a mobile signal problem risks investment in a solution that leaves the original difficulty unresolved.

Combining staff feedback with technical assessment can help organisations build a more complete understanding of healthcare connectivity challenges across the estate.

The Effect on Staff Wellbeing and Working Experience

Personal contact is part of the working experience too. In the survey, 68% said poor mobile signal prevented them from reaching friends and family while at work. A staff area with unreliable coverage may therefore matter even when it sits outside the main clinical areas.

In its discussion of difficulty contacting loved ones, the report also describes concerns about stress, isolation and burnout. These concerns deserve sensitive attention within wider conversations about working conditions and staff support.

Staff with reliable mobile coverage can usually contact family members during a break, receive updates from schools or carers, and remain reachable when personal circumstances require it. Where coverage is unreliable, those routine interactions may become more difficult, particularly for staff working long shifts or moving between different parts of an estate.

Separately, 22% of respondents said they had considered changing jobs because of connectivity infrastructure issues. That is a reason to listen to staff feedback; it does not establish that people resigned. Better connectivity can address a specific frustration, but workforce wellbeing and retention also depend on factors beyond communications infrastructure.

While clinical and operational communications are often prioritised in connectivity discussions, the ability for staff to remain connected to friends and family can also influence how they experience a workplace.

Why Mobile Coverage and Wi-Fi Need Assessing Together

Healthcare premises can depend on several complementary connections, each with a different role:

• Public mobile coverage supports calls, texts and mobile data through a user’s mobile network operator. Experience can vary between operators within the same building. Some organisations also assess how mobile connectivity can support resilience planning, provide an alternative communication route during network disruption and reduce reliance on certain legacy systems such as pagers or fixed-line devices, where operational requirements allow.
• Organisational Wi-Fi connects approved staff devices and applications to the organisation’s network under its access and security arrangements. This may include access to an Electronic Patient Record (EPR), the digital system used to manage patient records.
• Guest Wi-Fi provides internet access for patients, visitors and other permitted users. Its access arrangements and capacity should be assessed separately from the staff network.

Improving one connection does not automatically repair another. Public mobile access is not a default replacement for organisational Wi-Fi, and a medical device or clinical application should only use it where connectivity, security and integration requirements have been checked.

A useful assessment maps each workflow to the connection it actually uses. It also separates coverage problems from capacity constraints, outdated systems and application performance.

What Healthcare Providers Should Assess Before Investing

Bring IT, digital, estates and operational colleagues together, supported by staff feedback. Use the following questions to define the scope of an assessment:

• Where do staff experience unreliable calls, mobile data or Wi-Fi? Include wards, outpatient areas, staff rooms, basements, corridors and routes between buildings, as relevant to the estate.
• Beyond voice calls and text messaging, how could improved connectivity support wider operational, clinical or digital objectives across the estate?
• How does coverage differ between mobile network operators, and what happens during busy periods? Test representative devices and the tasks people need to complete.
• Which devices, applications and workflows depend on public mobile, organisational Wi-Fi or guest Wi-Fi? What access permissions and security controls apply?
• What infrastructure already exists, including cabling, power, antennas and Wi-Fi access points? What resilience is required, and have fallback arrangements been tested?
• Who owns monitoring, maintenance and fault escalation? How will teams identify whether a recurring problem belongs to the network, a device or an application?
• How can surveys and installation fit around clinical operations? Agree access windows, infection prevention requirements, phased working and arrangements for any planned interruption.

A structured assessment can help healthcare providers distinguish between issues relating to connectivity, infrastructure, applications and user workflows before investment decisions are made.

For new buildings and major refurbishments, wireless infrastructure guidance published by NHS England recommends considering requirements early. On existing sites, the same practical discipline helps teams define priorities before specifying equipment. Agree measurable acceptance criteria, such as call completion and application performance in agreed locations, then test against them after installation.

How Cellnex Supports Connected Healthcare Estates

At Cellnex UK, our in-building mobile coverage solutions address indoor public mobile coverage through technologies including Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS). A DAS distributes mobile signals through antennas positioned within a building.

Our neutral host approach allows multiple mobile network operators to share infrastructure. For healthcare estates, our services include design, installation, management of operator connections, monitoring and maintenance. The proposed design should reflect the site survey, required operators and the agreed operational requirements.

Our healthcare connectivity solutions sit within a wider estate strategy. Wi-Fi, applications and clinical devices still need their own assessment and governance. Planning these elements together helps providers specify which problems an investment is intended to address.

This approach helps healthcare providers understand where in-building mobile infrastructure supports wider hospital connectivity objectives and complements broader healthcare digital infrastructure programmes.

Next Steps For Improving Connectivity

Start with a shared record of where connections fail and what staff are trying to do at the time. Combine that evidence with surveys of mobile coverage and Wi-Fi performance, then prioritise improvements around the most persistent operational difficulties.

For many organisations, the exercise will reveal that hospital connectivity, Wi Fi performance and application behaviour need to be assessed separately before investment decisions are made.

Keep staff involved after changes are made. Technical acceptance tests and feedback from daily users should both inform whether the original problems have been addressed.

Discuss your healthcare estate’s mobile connectivity requirements with Cellnex UK