Telecare Aware

In the context of announcing yet another period of public consultation on the future of social care for adults (basically older and disabled people) leading to another Green Paper next year, UK’s Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson, today announced that £31 million would be put into the three Long Term Conditions Whole System Demonstrator (WSD) projects in Cornwall, Kent and Newham. Whether this includes, or is in addition to, the £12 million previously announced is not clear.

I speculate that the additional amount is required in order to fund the programme adequately - the initial £12 million having been shown to be too little in the light of the three site’s firmed up plans. This announcement also probably explains the heavy Department of Health (DH) embargo on news on progress from the sites until now. First it will not have wanted sites to expose the shortfall in funding and second, when internal wrangling about finding the additional funding was resolved, they would have wanted to keep the ‘good news’ for the Secretary of State’s announcement.

Now DH has made its national announcement, let’s hope that we can have some real information - and, hopefully, real good news for patients and clients - from the demonstrator sites.

DH press release with details of the consultation and telecare/telehealth spending.

For previous items on the WSD programme as it unfolded over the past two years, use the Telecare Aware search box (in the navigation bar above) for ‘WSD’.

Northern Ireland’s Department of Health and Social Services is getting set to issue a tender for the supply of telehealth services to cover 5,000 people by 2011.

The initiative will see Northern Ireland invest £46m in telemedicine services to better support chronic disease management.

Non-UK readers may not be aware that Northern Ireland has one integrated health and social care agency with responsibility for the planning, delivery, finance and regulation of health and social care together. This cuts out the tremendous amount of overhead in terms of time, staff and general cost that bedevils health and social care services working together locally in England, where they are organisationally and culturally separate.

This item from E-Health Europe makes an interesting contrast with the English Department of Health’s announcement above.

What better to put the two stories above into perspective than this interview with Dr. Martin Denz, President of the European Health Telematics Association. “A major thing that EHTEL is also trying to do is to bridge the gap between policy makers, IT providers and health professionals who all understand health and health care differently.”

The item also has some terminology implications. Read it here.

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