St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital — Network Infrastructure Maintenance & Expansion

Network Infrastructure Maintenance & Expansion St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital, Jirapa – National Service Scheme (NSS) Role: IT Support / Network Technician Duration: October 2023 – January 2025 During my National Service, I maintained and expanded the hospital’s network infrastructure supporting the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS), a mission-critical EHR platform used for patient records, clinical workflows, and hospital operations. Any outage directly impacted care delivery, making stable connectivity essential. Key Contributions • Restored connectivity to wards: Diagnosed and replaced faulty Cat5 cables affecting the male and female medical wards, restoring full access to LHIMS. • Extended network to Mortuary: Installed new cabling, RJ45 terminations, and an AP to provide LHIMS access for Mortuary staff. • Emergency switch replacement: Supported procurement and configuration of three switches damaged by a rainstorm, reconnecting APs and minimizing downtime across departments. Technologies & Skills • Ethernet cabling (Cat5), structured routing, RJ45 termination, cable testing • Layer 2 switch configuration, AP deployment, diagnostics, and recovery • Documentation, topology mapping, and small-team leadership Impact • Improved hospital-wide reliability of LHIMS • Enabled critical departments to maintain uninterrupted digital workflows • Gained hands-on experience troubleshooting and resolving real infrastructure failures in a healthcare IT environment Reflection This project showed me how small infrastructure failures like a damaged switch or faulty cable can disrupt entire hospital systems. It reinforced the importance of redundancy, environmental protection, and better VLAN segmentation for future designs.