Taking Telecare to a new level

With the beginning of a new year, after considerable thought I have decided to take telecare activities to the next level. Having spent three years as a Telecare Coordinator for a London Borough and obtained excellent CQC reports for the service whilst in charge, and having worked as an academic for over ten years working in the field of telecare, assistive technology, smart homes, telehealth, ambient technologies, ubiquitous technologies, eHealth, mHealth, mobile technologies in addittion to my other interests in architecture and building design, health in general and of course people with long term conditions and disabled people, I now feel that the time is right for something new.

The Whole Systems Demonstrators (WSD) by the UK’s Dpeartment of Health (DH) has recently reported on its headline findings which clearly indicate a positive use of technology can save lives and save resources. There is little doubt that these findings will be scrutinised fully once the full reports are available, and at this point the headlines might not reveal the whole picture, but they are very encouraging.

We can now be confident that technology can save lives and resources, but we also need to ensure that the technology meets the needs and expectations of the people requiring it. It is important that as a result of using technology the person is not expected to become a machine, operating in unreasonable and predictive manners.

If you have a long term condition, your life is punctuated by regular events, such as taking medication, medical appointments, all the way through to the more chronic who might require assistance in all activities of daily living. What I consider unacceptable, is that technology designed to assist becomes the problem. This could be through making assumptions about people’s lifestyles and expecting unreasonable interactions such as checking-in every hour, or pressing a button regularly to stop an alert. This could also be through false alerts or just the technology not meeting operational expectations.

We are in a era which is really exciting. Technology is evolving faster than ever before and we should be able to harness this technology to enhance people’s live by removing barriers of distance, by producing virtual communities, and bringing virtual services through the cloud to people anywhere in the world.

My current concern is that although some electronic devices benefit from the advances in modern technologies, (eg mobile phones, tablets etc) other more mundane technologies, such as pendant alarm based systems or wandering sensors are failing to think beyond the standard.

We are entering a new year, 2012, and we have the chance to begin to create the world we want. A world where distance is not an issue, where access to products and services is far easier through modern technology. My hope for this new year is that we can get together and design products that will last, which have relevance and meaning to those we design for. This year could and should be the year of personalisation and innovation.

We need to stop waiting for tomorrow to create what is needed to today. We need to act now!

We need to change the way we think about products.

We need to change the way we think about services and service provision.

We need to change the way we think about technology and we need to change the way we think about people.

We need to step away from the tick box solution.

Let’s make Person-Centred Design truly person-centred!

It is with these messages in mind that I have started a new business called gdewsbury which is a Freelance Specialist Technology Writing Service and Consultancy (gdewsbury.com) with which I wish to work with the cutting edge businesses to assist in the build and design or truly exeptional products and help small or new businesses become great through expert input.

This is the year to take telecare to a new level.

The increase in telecare

With the release of the UK government’s “Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS” document the emphasis for health promotion falls on GPs as they will be getting the vast amount of money from the dissolution of the PCTs (Primary Care Trusts). This really interests me. When I worked for social services in North London, I found that GPs were by and large a very difficult group of people to interest in telecare. Actually finding access to their forum was hard and harder still to get any enthusiasm for the potentials of this new technology.

It seems that with the release of this document and the fact that the commissioning of services will be undertaken predominantly by GPs in the future that they are going to need a crash course in telecare, telehealth, mHealth and eHealth.

So how is this going to happen?

Who is going to do this?

The only way that this can be done is for telecare to be included in the documentation that the government produce but it is nowhere to be seen.

If we are to follow the preventative agenda, then surely telecare must be the spearhead of changing the way we consider health and care. Ideally as a result of the proposed changes and the distinct lack of money in the UK it behoves all GPs to get tele-trained pretty quickly.

I can see that this should also not be something that comes from the manufacturers as this could bread suspicion in GPs rather I can see a role in this for the TSA (Telecare Services Association) as well as the government to bring this information to the desktops of the General Practitioner of tomorrow. But before this can happen, how are can the profile of telecare be raised to such an extent that GPs will actually begin to take a message on board that they have resisted for the last five years?

Any answers gratefully received!