Telecare
Managing new demands requires health and social care commissioners to make important decisions on how they can best invest resources in technology.
Service patterns must be shaped to meet the changing care and support needs and lifestyle choices of people and to assist staff in managing the way services are provided to individuals.
Telecare services allow the risks associated with independent living to be managed in the home and enable users to live in their own homes with dignity for longer. They release services from constraints created by more risk-averse policies and practices.
The telecare equipment used to provide a variety of solutions forms a key but relatively small part of a complete holistic telecare service. The human resources that are required play a far more significant role in service delivery, eg. referral, assessment process, and in providing appropriate response. This is in addition to the work required to develop an implementation, eg. commissioning, charging models, ethics, governance, evaluation plans, partnerships between multiple organisations, etc, etc.
For the equipment element of the service there are three main physical components:-
1. The telecare device that raises an alarm in the home
2. The social alarm (with personal pendant) that primarily transmits alarms from the home to the monitoring centre
3. The monitoring centre, which receive an alarm, an operator who speaks to the user and arranges an appropriate response
In addition there are a number of services that are provided around each of these components:-
- Installation in the home and user instruction (mainly of telecare devices and social alarms)
- Inventory management of devices and social alarms in the community (mostly managed at the monitoring centre)
- Maintenance and support of all three components
- Monitoring carried out using the monitoring centre equipment
- Response carried out by a variety of service providers depending on the client need
In addition there are background services that are required to facilitate the service:-
- Training to meet differing needs including those who refer potential telecare users, those who provide the assessment, those who install the equipment, additional response protocols for response centre operators
- Marketing and promotion
- Finance and Procurement
At Chubb we work with our customers to develop partnerships to help overcome all these barriers and would like to work with your orgainsation to develop and implement your telecare strategy