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The Bow Group & University of Leeds: Telecare Paper
1625hrs, Saturday 19th September 2009
FULL REPORT (PDF) - DOWNLOAD HERE
By 2025 the number of people aged 85 or older in England is set to increase by 70% to nearly two million. In this group more than a third of men (37%) and more than half of women (55%) live alone. Most have a limiting long term illness.
Responding to the Government’s Green paper on social care ‘Shaping the Future of Care Together’, the University of Leeds and the Bow Group today produce new research which shows:
- Telecare offers a proven “win-win” for the health and social care system by helping sick, disabled and older people remain at home for longer by supporting them 24/7 with alarms, alerts, health monitoring and communication.
- The time for the universal, mainstreamed approach to telecare is now.
- Telecare consists of a base unit and wireless sensors that link to a 24 hour response centre that monitor risks associated with, for example, falls, fire, dementia, poor health, gas leaks and security issues.
With many people living longer with illness or disability, the future scenario for care at home – where most people wish to be supported during periods of illness, disability or infirmity - threatens to be increasingly costly. Families, employers and the public purse will have to pick up the soaring costs.
Social care costs are rising not because those who provide care are generously rewarded. Care work is amongst the lowest paid occupations. Carers’ benefits are derisory and paid to just 10% of family carers. Instead, demand for social care will soon outstrip supply and this responsibility will pass to the state, where funding is unsustainable.
Sue Yeandle, Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and Co Director of CIRCLE says, "This paper is about one of the most important challenges facing this country - how the growing demand for health and social care at home can be met, when faced with unsustainable costs and rising demands for caring labour."
The report finds that rising demand for care is outstripping capacity to care and that the current system of care and support is unsustainable. New options are needed that are more efficient without harming services to:
- Enable people to remain at home who would otherwise need to be placed in residential or nursing care establishments;
- Reduce the number of preventable injuries, accidents or risks encountered by sick, disabled or vulnerable people living at home;
- Support unpaid carers to care without experiencing such intense pressure or stress that they themselves become ill or have to give up their caring role;
- Improve the efficiency of home care services;
- Offer additional choice, independence and dignity to sick, frail or disabled people by giving them information, safety, control, and practical assistance.
- Projects up and down the country in the past decade have demonstrated that telecare can deliver almost all of the above, at remarkably low cost. Telecare is not a panacea, but remarkably no study of telecare has yet demonstrated any negative or adverse effects.
Web Team, Conservative Medical Society from The Bow Group .
Top-Up Payments
1911hrs, Saturday 6th September 2008
1. Do you agree that whilst receiving NHS care, no-one should be charged for the treatment they receive?
2. Do you agree that NHS resources should be used solely for NHS patients and that there should be no cross-subsidy from NHS resources to private patients?
3. Do you believe that it should continue to be required, under NHS guidance, that no-one can simultaneously be an NHS patient and a privately-funded patient in r elation to the same treatment?
4. If you support 3. above, do you believe it should apply “within the same episode of care” or “in relation to the same course of treatment” or “a spell of care”? And what are your views on how these should be defined?
5. If you support 3. above do you support proposals, through value-based pricing of new medicines, to ensure that the NHS should not exclude from possible use, medicines which are clinically effective as a part of that treatment, subject to continuing comparisons between treatments for relative clinical effectiveness?
6. Do you agree that if patients access private care in relation to treatments not provided by the NHS, this should not affect their entitlement to NHS services; and their access to NHS treatment should be based on clinical priority?
7. Should GPs be able to offer private treatment to their NHS patients, where the treatment or service is outside the scope of NHS coverage?
Email your views to: information@conservativemedicine.org.uk or click here for a web form.
Richard J Pinder, Younger Members Section, Conservative Medical Society.
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