Friday 7 September 2012

Millions of people could benefit from telecare

Millions of people could benefit from telecare: New research maps the number of telecare users, and looks at how to maximise its potential.

Telecare has long been tipped as the future of social care. Yet little has really been known about who uses it, or who could in future. This gap in evidence is important: for all telecare's apparent potential, policymakers will struggle to realise the benefits across the care system without knowing more about who uses it.
Recognising this issue, the Strategic Society Centre today publishes a major piece of quantitative social research – with the support of Age UK – to map users of personal alarms and alerting devices among the older population in England. We estimate that there are at least a million telecare users aged 60+ in England. The majority are women over 70 who live alone.
Some of the most notable findings concern funding. Anything between 30% and 50% of telecare users pay for the service privately, suggesting the private market is substantial, even if local authorities remain the drivers of telecare use. Interestingly, the incomes of those who pay privately differ little from those who don't. The low cost of telecare as a form of support has long been one of its attractions.
Our research suggests that whatever objections people may have to telecare, cost is not one of them.
Another striking finding relates to the other types of care people receive. Overall, telecare users are more likely to receive other forms of support than non-users, showing that they use it to complement other sources of formal and informal care. As well as mapping current users, we wanted to estimate the number of potential users in the older population. We did this by carefully studying the impairments and conditions that current users experience, and identifying how many people in the older population displayed substantially similar characteristics.
Using this approach, we estimate there could be as many as 4 million people who could benefit from telecare in some form. Within this group, 1.2 million people live alone, so could be considered the immediate target of policymakers.
However, it is striking how few of these people are among the 532,000 (estimated by the Department of Health) who receive regular home care from their local authority. In fact, we estimate around twice that number of potential telecare users receive disability benefits in some form, so it is in fact the Department for Work and Pensions – not local authorities – that has the most contact with potential telecare users.
Of course, telecare is not a static technology. Our research provides a snapshot of its use at a particular point in time, but the number and characteristics of potential users could change in the next 10 to 20 years as technology evolves. However, we were able to glean some insights. More than half of the potential telecare users we identified use a mobile phone, but less than 20% use the internet. So if smartphones continue their onward march, telecare may in future bypass home computers altogether.
However, by looking at potential telecare users in terms of their abilities and impairments rather than their living situations, the centre's research really shows that the final frontier will be much greater incorporation into informal care.
Consider this: according to the centre's estimates, there are 1.2 million people aged 60+ who could benefit from telecare, but currently rely on informal care. This far outstrips the number of older people receiving council-funded – or indeed privately purchased — home care.
Telecare is still often seen as a form of support for people living on their own, frequently after the death of a partner.
But our research shows that if we really want to maximise its potential benefits to society, we need to bring it much further into the realm of informal care. James Lloyd is director at the Strategic Society Centre
Guardian Professional.

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