EXECUTIVE SUMMARY


presenting cost effective solutions to the market”


by sharing responsibility that improvements are created. Principles must be agreed upon that govern the organisation’s decisions, and the decisions are based on what is best for the user rather than the organisation. No group in the consortium will get paid unless everyone is pulling their weight, so collective work and improvement is essential. Joe Killen spoke on behalf of Tunstall, a


telecare equipment company with a turnover of about €300m. The typical user of their products is an elderly person who lives alone in their home. They have a radio button, which they wear around their neck, and when they have a problem they press the button, which puts them through to a 24-hour control centre that can deal with the situation. Tunstall launched a project with the Andalusian government, which runs a telecare service with about two hundred thousand connections today. “We discussed the possibility of using European funding to improve the quality of service for elderly people in Andalusia, with a key objective of exchanging information and creating synergies between the social services department and the regional health service in order to provide higher quality service to the end user at a lower cost,” Killen explains. Tunstall agreed to create an interface which


exchanges voice and data between the social care system, the telecare system and the health service. The traditional response after getting a call from a patient with a history of cardiovascular problems would end with the social care system contacting the ambulance and getting them to call the patient and take over. The problem with this is that the patient might not be able to pick up the call due to incapacitation. Tunstall’s new service got round


40 | AAL FORUM 2014


“When finance is limited, you have to focus on


this by allowing calls to be forward directly to the ambulance along with relevant data for the specific patient such as address and medical records. The regional government is extremely pleased both with the increase in the quality of service as well as in the economies realised by emergency services being able to intervene more quickly. Killen highlighted a number of important


lessons to draw from this case study. Most areas of Europe are subject to significant financial restrictions today. This means that technology solutions cannot just provide a solution, they must also increase efficiency. because that only works when the market demand in terms of finance is growing. When finance is limited, you have to focus on presenting cost effective solutions to the market. When looking at implementing effective solutions, you must coordinate well between private centre technologists and public sector services deliveries. The world of technology and the world of social care speak very different languages. The technology development market offers fantastic new ideas all the time but often there is no route to market because the public sector budget has not been analysed in order to tie cost efficiencies into the solutions being proposed.


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