Tag Archives: social care
Kosovan delegation eager to learn how social care is provided in Norfolk
Norfolk Social Services is a showcase
27 April 2012
Norfolk’s social care services will be showcased to an international audience when a delegation from Kosovo visits the county next week.
The group will be welcomed by Norfolk County Council on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of a week-long visit to the country that has been arranged by the Department for International Development.
With a task of shaping social care services following their decentralisation in Kosovo, the group, consisting of Mayors, Directors of Social Care for several local authorities in Kosovo, and Officers from the Ministry for Social Welfare, are keen to learn how Norfolk provides social care services for both adults and children.
Dogs to help people with dementia
Dogs that make people with dementia more confident and a scent device to improve appetites are two designs that have won official approval
Five teams, £360,000 and 20 weeks to research and design a product or service to help people living with dementia. It sounds like something from The Healthcare Apprentice but the Design Council and Department of Health has unveiled five projects that they hope will significantly improve the lives of people with dementia and their carers. They calculate that the combined social return value of the project will be £500m.
Among the projects is dementia dog, a programme training specially selected assistance dogs to improve the confidence, wellbeing and support of people with dementia; online tool grouple, which helps families plan and share the care of a person with dementia; and ode, a plug-in device that emits aromas at set times to improve appetite and eating patterns.
Alongside the buddiband, and trading times, the projects were selected from more than 150 entries to be given funding and support from an expert panel including Gill Ayling, deputy director of older people and dementia at the Department of Health, and Joshua Hardie, the head of corporate responsibility at Tesco.
DH must explain how telecare saves £1.2bn
Last month, care services minister Paul Burstow said telecare and telehealth ‘could save the NHS up to £1.2bn over five years’.
25 April 2012
It would seem common sense that the ability to deploy the latest technology in the NHS would result in both the savings that the £20bn Nicholson challenge demands and the improvement in the quality of patient care that is at the heart of the coalition government’s NHS ambitions.
Earlier this year, GP magazine carried a feature about success stories in south London, one of which involved how preventing 24 unnecessary hospital admissions over a year was thought to have saved £55,000 (GP, 11 January).
But, hang on, journalists and GPs thrive on evidence like that costed out for us in south London. Exactly how had the DH calculated its £1.2bn?
