The Re-imagining Telecare programme of work aims to provide national leadership, and support for telecare service providers during a period of significant change. Opportunities will present for service integration, re-design and transformation as telecare services transition to digital and the recommendations from the Independent Review of Adult Social Care in Scotland are taken forward.
TEC telecare will work in close partnership with TEC in Housing and the Local Government Digital Office to deliver this work programme, and collaborate with a range of national partners, including the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre.
Work streams currently underway include:
- Developing a shared vision – 12 ambitions for telecare
- Proactive Outbound Calling Tests of Change and Learning Collaborative
- Consumer Technologies:
- Bring Your Own Device Test of Change
- Report of the learning from Alzheimer Scotland’s consumer technology case studies that contributed to the development of About Digital and Me (ADAM)
Proactive Outbound Calling Test of Change
In late 2019 FarrPoint completed a Review of Telecare Call Handling. The review established the call handling arrangements currently used in Scotland and recommended several improvements to the scope of telecare services and how they are delivered. One of these recommended improvements was for telecare partnerships to offer proactive services.
The Scottish Government and COSLA commissioned Farrpoint to conduct further investigation into proactive services. Given the introduction of wellbeing calls by many telecare services during the Covid outbreak, the report focuses primarily on outbound calling.
The objectives were to:
- Establish the potential scope of proactive telecare service(s) in Scotland.
- Determine the benefits offered by the services from a service user, service provider and wider health & care perspective.
- Examine how proactive services could be implemented within the existing Scottish telecare call handling arrangements.
More on the report by FarrPoint on Proactive Telecare Services.
To build on the learning and momentum of COVID-19 outbound calling and to gain rapid insight into practicalities benefits and feasibility of working proactively. The TEC Programme has funded proof of concept test of change (ToC) projects. Four telecare services are developing and testing targeted outbound calling, in combination with better use of existing intelligence, as a potential sustainable enhancement of their current service.
To maximise the learning across the four sites, a learning collaborative has been established, providing opportunities for knowledge exchange, problem solving and co-designing aspects of their tests.
A DHI/ TEC funded evaluation will draw on experiences of the four test sites and the learning collaborative members (including TEC, Care Inspectorate, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, and Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre) to:
- Identify factors that are critical for implementing an approach that is strengths based, personalised, safe effective and efficient; andÂ
- Inform the potential for targeted proactive calling as a sustainable enhancement of telecare services i.e. it both adds value and is affordable
Key TEC documents
- Proactive Telecare Services – available as both the Final Study Report (December 2020) or a Summary of Study Findings (January 2021)
- Proactive Outbound Calling to Telecare Service Users During the COVID-19 Outbreak (May 2020)