Reimagining Telecare

The Reimagining 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 and building on a shared vision – 12 ambitions for telecare
Proactive Outbound Calling Tests of Change and Learning Collaborative
Pathfinders Telecare service providers funded to take a service design approach to service transformation
Service design learning, community of practice and resources to raise awareness and usage of these techniques
Stakeholder engagement with current and potential telecare customers

Consumer Technologies inclusion in telecare offerings:

Bring Your Own Device Test of Change
Ethical approaches to data security and online safety within a service offering

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 Technology Enabled Care (TEC) Programme funded proof of concept test of change (ToC) projects.

Proactive telecare is enabled by greater integration with other health, care and housing services, the third sector and community supports.

The TEC Programme’s working definition of proactive telecare is: “Proactive Telecare has a deeper relationship with the person receiving the service, gathering insights into patterns of behaviour and preferences over time, through good conversations, devices and linked data, enabling a more tailored and preventative service that aims to anticipate and prevent crises, and support wellbeing and resilience.”

Between January and July 2021, TEC funded three telecare services. The main objectives of the proactive outbound calling Tests of Change were to:

Test models for delivering proactive outbound calling as an enhancement of an existing telecare service.
Identify all costs and benefits of delivering this enhanced delivery model to establish desirability, sustainability and scalability.
Identify the practicalities, challenges and enablers for delivering the tested model.
Identify how the findings from the tests of change will be used to further develop proactive telecare service delivery models for Scotland.

An independent evaluation of Phase One jointly funded by Scotland’s Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) and undertaken by the University of the West of Scotland concluded that staff, carers and customers valued proactive wellbeing calls. Job satisfaction increased for staff, and customers felt more connected and less isolated.

Enablers for proactive outbound calliing: workforce skills; integrated working; data; technology; strengths-based and outcomes focused approach

NEW! Phase One Test of Change Summary Report now published

Phase Two: Demonstrating Value

Phase Two of the project will support test sites to continue their projects, build on learning from Phase One, reach a larger group of customers and have a clear focus on demonstrating systems with individual and organisational benefits. Phase Two started in April 2022.

Aim

The aim of the wellbeing calls is to promote confidence and independence at home as the individual recovers from a change in health status, social circumstances or care setting.

Focussing on short term, more intensive interventions demonstrating a clear contribution to the current significant service pressures associated with the Covid pandemic.

Test Sites

Three telecare services, City of Edinburgh HSCP, Bield Housing and Care and Dumfries and Galloway HSCP are now in Phase Two of their test of change.

They are developing and testing targeted outbound calling, with a view to building a business case to continue and embed the approach and provide a sustainable enhancement of their current service.

The sites have established their eligibility criteria and measurement framework to allow the project to collect data to evidence clear service, system and organisational benefit to secure long-term funding.

Learning Collaborative

The Learning Collaborative continues into Phase Two and maximises learning from the outbound calling tests of change by creating opportunities:

for knowledge exchange
to share learning, experience, ideas, successes and things that don’t go quite so well
to problem solve
to co-design aspects of the pilots
to provide peer support

Evaluation (Updated April 2023)

The University of the West of Scotland have completed their evaluation report on Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Proactive Telecare Outbound Calling Tests of Change Project.

This evaluation was commissioned and jointly funded by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) and the TEC Programme.

The evaluation represents the reflective learning from planning and delivering Proactive Telecare for 178 customers in Phase 1 and 109 in Phase 2, across three different test sites and working with five HSCP partners across central and southwest Scotland.

The evaluation focused on the three test sites:

Bield Housing and Care
Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP)
Dumfries and Galloway (D&G) HSCP

The report is available here along with a summary report which highlights the impact; feasibility; readiness to scale; and customer, carer and staff experience feedback.

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)