£2.8m scheme for better health care at home
By FIONA McKAY
TWO multi-million, technological health pro- grammes have been launched officially to help deliver better healthcare in people’s homes.
Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing Alex Neil MSP unveiled the two Telehealth and Telecare programmes, worth £2.8million, when he visited an East Ayrshire monitoring station within the council.
The programmes are being jointly funded by the European Commission and the Scottish Government and are part of the Digital Health and Care Innova-tion Partnership aimed at using new technologies to support people with disabilities and/or health conditions in their homes or communities.
Mr Neil said: “These projects are a fantastic example of how using innovative technologies as part of effective service redesign can enable people to be treated as close to home as possible and reduce the need for hospital admissions.
“Scotland has already made significant pro-gress on developing and expanding new technologies, and by delivering these two projects across the same geographical area will enable us to expand even further the role technology plays in supporting 21st century healthcare.”
Called United4Health and SmartCare, the three-year programmes will operate within seven local health and care partnerships across Ayrshire & Arran, East Renfrewshire, Renfrewshire and Clyde Valley.
The United4Health programme will give patients living with diabetes, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or heart failure a central role in the management of their condition through home-based mon- itoring of the patient’s health and wellbeing.
The SmartCare programme will link service provision across health, social care, family, informal carers and the voluntary sector but using technology to support the health, care and wellbeing for the over 50s with a specific focus on falls prevention and dementia care.
Full article here http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/28m-scheme-for-better-health-care-at-home-121360n.20811628
It is excellent to see that the Scottish Government are taking action to ensure that our elderly and infirm receive the best possible care. Safety in nursing homes is paramount and so setting up a programme that focuses on fall prevention is one of the best courses that could be taken. Falls in the elderly can have a very serious impact on their quality of life and so the governments involvement in trying to reduce falls can only be a good sign.