Nottinghamshire county council is to roll out telecare technology to provide support for older and disabled people in a deal arranged within a Buying Solutions framework.
The technology will link a range of sensors in a person’s home to a 24 hour monitoring centre. The sensors will include:
• Home safety sensors for smoke, carbon monoxide, flood and heat alarms.
• Property exit sensors, which can alert the monitoring centre if a person with dementia wanders away from their home at an inappropriate time.
• Fall detectors, which automatically send an alert to the monitoring centre if a person experiences a black out and falls.
• Bed occupancy monitors, which spark an alert if a person has not returned to bed during the night.
• Night time epilepsy sensors, to watch for whether someone has a seizure while in bed.
Carers will receive alerts triggered by telecare users to a portable pager.
Mark Douglas, project manager for assistive technology at Nottinghamshire county council, told GGC that before the deal with technology supplier Tunstall, the council’s telecare service offering was limited. “We had arrangements with five of our seven districts, but the switch allows us to provide the service to a wider range of people across the entire county, including all unpaid carers,” he said.
Douglas said that one of the main aims of the project is to save money and make efficiency savings as the technology will allow people to live at home for longer and reduce the need for telecare users to access traditional services. He said that he envisages the provision of about 200 hundred kits annually for the moment, but this may increase.
The service, which utilises the existing home phone line to connect the sensors to the monitoring centre, will cost £2 a week. There are no other charges for people who have had a county council assessment and are eligible for social care support or carer services.
Nottinghamshire is now in the process of taking referrals for the scheme from social workers, and hopes to get the project up and running as soon as possible. Douglas said it is unclear how long the contract will run for because there is a possibility that the Buying Solutions framework, which expires in August 2012, could be extended.
