Aims of the Telecare Knowledge Network
Improving the management of chronic and long term conditions is a key priority for national health policy. The emergence of telecare over the last few years provides carers with a new care delivery option which helps them manage the risk of maintaining people in the community allowing earlier identification of changes in the person’s condition and enabling more appropriate and timely interventions.
To date, the main focus of telecare has been on (1) home safety and security monitoring and (2) vital signs monitoring within a ‘reactive mode’ approach, i.e. where an alert triggers a response from an appropriate service. So far the use of telecare has been limited to small scale trials which have been developed from a small selection of standardised devices. In the main these trials have not been fully integrated with the whole health and social care system and have been reactive. To meet future needs telecare will have to be available on a much larger scale, involve many more sensors and devices which capable of being personalised to individual user needs, fully integrated with the care system and predictive (to allow observation of longer term trends and earlier intervention).
The development of telecare has been given a boost by the government’s commitment to a number of telecare related programmes. These include the £80M Preventative Technology Grant (PTG) over two years from April 2006 which is being provided to enable councils to invest in telecare to help an additional 160,000 older people nationally to remain independent at home (including approx £5M in the South East region), and the funding of Whole System Demonstrators described in the Department of Health White Paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say, which will be designed to test the provision of integrated care services (including the use of telecare) to a population of approx 350,000 each.
In support of these initiatives the Telecare Knowledge Network (TKN) provides a discussion forum for care providers, suppliers and academics (both through meetings and online) so that there is
- better co-ordination of trials and sharing of results and insights;
- awareness of opportunities to collaborate rather than unnecessary and wasteful duplication of effort;
- shared understanding of user needs and funding opportunities;
- establishment of an effective marketplace for telecare components, systems integration and services;
- opportunities to create and exploit new IP in telecare.
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