As Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said: “We have to maximise the potential of reablement, telecare and other innovations that can dramatically improve people’s lives while also being highly efficient.
“Some local authorities have picked up this challenge, others have not. We need to accelerate this change so that these services and this approach is the norm.”
It’s this principle that underpins the JIP’s telecare support programme which is helping local authorities in the West Midlands expand the scope of telecare to make services more efficient, assist service users to live independently in their own homes, and promote joined up working between health and social care.
We are also spearheading a series of pilot projects in local authorities across the region, to show the impact telecare can have on the cost, quality and the personalisation of services.
We’ve invested in the development of an online one stop telecare information portal. Still at prototype stage, it will eventually carry all the information needed to find out about services, products, where to buy them and how to use them.
We are aware telecare and telehealth still arouses suspicion that personal contact between practitioners and service users will be reduced leading to greater isolation, as well as redundancies and increased workloads for staff left behind.
Ultimately it is just one of the responses to how we, as practitioners in social care and the health services, can care for a rapidly expanding ageing population in a cost effective way and to a high standard.
Paul A Davies
Lead DASS for Telecare
Executive Director of Adult Social
Care and Inclusion
Walsall Metropolitan Borough.
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