Falkirk Council to safeguard digital telecare

Falkirk Council has become the first local authority in Scotland to go live with an end-to-end digital telecare service.

Working alongside Falkirk Health and Social Care Partnership, the council has safeguarded its life and limb Mobile Emergency Care Service (MECS), which currently helps 4,000 vulnerable people live independently at home.

The service, which traditionally relied on analogue phone lines to operate, is now the first telecare service provided by a Scottish council to be digitally enabled end to end, four years before telecommunication providers switch off all analogue lines in the UK.

The ground-breaking progress has now been recognised, with the council and Partnership awarded the Gold Level 1 Digital Telecare Implementation Award by the Digital Telecare for Scottish Local Government Programme.

The council and partnership will now work towards the Gold Level 2 Implementation Award which requires user acceptance testing with a representative group of high-risk users, migration with this group and the solution rolled out to at least 40% of service users.

Once this has been achieved, the ‘Platinum’ peak award will be on the horizon which requires the digital telecare solution to be delivered to a minimum 80% of service users for at least nine months.

Martyn Wallace, the chief digital officer for the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government and the senior responsible officer of digital telecare in Scotland, said: ‘Receiving the award is a significant achievement and robustly demonstrates the overall functionality and effectiveness of Falkirk Council and Falkirk Health and Social Care Partnership’s digital telecare solution.
‘This enables them to confidently progress further on their journey and continue to share their learnings with other telecare service providers as leaders in the field.’

Photo Credit – Falkirk Council