There are several services that have been set up to both reduce the pain and suffering of the elderly and to reduce the crises that result in hospital admissions and early entry into residential care. These services include falls prevention teams and community matrons supporting people with long term conditions. Telecare has traditionally been used by social service teams to enable a client to summon help, usually following a fall or a crisis.

More people are living longer and will need to maintain their independence, dignity and choice. The funding to provide these services to support older people is limited; we are already seeing social service and NHS budgets being exceeded despite significant increases over the past few years. There is little money to invest in ‘pump priming’ a preventative strategy when most of the budget is spent on reacting to crises.

If there is not an effective ‘invest to save’ approach to managing the independence of older people within their own homes, then social care and NHS budgets will continue to be crisis managed. Services to older people will be further reduced resulting in increased individual hardship and at the same time costing our society more as the increased hardship will result in more crises.

Telecare has now been endorsed by the government as a way of supporting older people in their homes and government grants are available. Person centric preventative telecare that supports both social and health services is available and in use by many supporting teams. It is these person centric measures and alarms that form the basis of preventative telecare by allowing early intervention if the client shows signs of deterioration. In many cases early intervention can prevent a fall or other event becoming a crisis resulting in hospitalisation.
Preventative telecare products and services are in use today in the UK. They provide the means of enabling our frail and older citizens to remain in their own homes safely, with confidence and with dignity, without the threat of residential care, by enabling cost effective and timely interventions. Prevention is better than cure.

WristCare Home System with Wellness Data is a telecare device; gathering patient information and sending it over the normal telephone line. Worn like a wristwatch by a patient or vulnerable person, it is a community alarm device and it can also provide health care staff with a measure of the ‘wellness’ of the person whilst in their own home in many cases allowing early intervention before a crisis has occurred. There are more than 20,000 people worldwide benefiting from using WristCare.