{"id":2999,"date":"2018-02-14T11:45:57","date_gmt":"2018-02-14T11:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/socialcareworkforce\/?p=2999"},"modified":"2021-12-04T21:10:03","modified_gmt":"2021-12-04T21:10:03","slug":"telecare-webinar-for-research-in-practice-for-adults-at-dartington-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/socialcareworkforce\/2018\/02\/14\/telecare-webinar-for-research-in-practice-for-adults-at-dartington-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"Telecare webinar for Research in Practice for Adults at Dartington Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Woolham<\/strong><\/a> is Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King\u2019s. John leads a seminar on Wednesday 21 February 2018: Telecare for older people: are we getting the best out of it? <\/i><\/a><\/em>(1,347 words)<\/p>\n

Read the report:<\/strong> The UTOPIA project. Using Telecare for Older People In Adult social care: The findings of a 2016-17 national survey of local authority telecare provision for older people in England. <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>RiPfA, and its sister organisation, Research in Practice (RiP) work primarily with local authorities to encourage the use of evidence based practice. As someone who has a local authority background and has always been keen on promoting the use of good quality evidence, the opportunity to take part in a RiPfA organised event wasn\u2019t one to pass up on.\u00a0 It was also the first time I\u2019d led a webinar. It\u2019s definitely odd being in what\u2019s effectively a studio, with a computer screen containing a clock (so you don\u2019t overrun) your power point presentation, and a video of you as a \u2018talking head\u2019 \u2013 pretty much the same thing as participants see. You can\u2019t see them of course, but they can send you messages. \u00a0What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, actually. The fact that it didn\u2019t owed much to the skills of Leo Heinl from RiPfA who managed the technology. Leo is a fellow \u2018biker too, so we talked motorcycles a bit, but that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n

My presentation was entitled \u2018What does evidence informed telecare look like?\u2019 and was \u2013 to rather a large extent \u2013 based on research on telecare we have been leading at King\u2019s over the last couple of years. The study, funded over 14 months by the NIHR School for Social Care Research, became known as the UTOPIA project: Using Telecare for Older People In Adult social care<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My presentation began by suggesting here has been an interesting divergence between evidence and practice in relation to telecare in England. The Department of Health commissioned a major trial of the effectiveness of telecare and telehealth several years ago to address what was then a gap in evidence: policy guidance \u2013 \u2018Building Telecare in England\u2019 had been published but the evidential foundations were several small to medium sized evaluations of pilot studies \u2013 one of which was my own. These had all concluded that telecare could both save money and also help maintain higher levels of independence. It therefore seemed to have been widely expected that this large scale trial – which became known as the \u2018Whole System Demonstrator Project\u2019 (WSD) would validate policy decisions that had already been made. This didn\u2019t turn out to be the case: the WSD project team concluded that outcomes for telecare users were not<\/em> significantly better than those of people who received more traditional forms of care.<\/p>\n

By then, of course, local authorities were having to respond to the austerity policies of the coalition government and many \u2013 despite the WSD evidence \u2013 continued to invest significant sums of money in setting up and running telecare services. The WSD findings were largely ignored or seen as flawed, unhelpful or out of date by local authorities.\u00a0 I was puzzled by this. Why would cash-strapped local government continue to invest in something that a recent study had argued was demonstrably ineffective? Though I did think the WSD findings were flawed (no research is perfect) to write it off was odd. After all, it was, and remains, the largest randomised controlled trial on telecare in the world. Although you could argue that they should have followed participants up for longer, been more selective over who was recruited, or taken responsibility for assessing for and deciding on what kinds of technology to install, it was, at the end of the day, a pragmatic, real world trial and to have taken over local authority roles in assessing for and deploying technology would have massively increased its cost.\u00a0 So what was going on? Was I missing something?<\/p>\n

The presentation then summarised key findings from our online survey of local authority telecare leads completed earlier this year. This achieved an overall response rate of 75% and so is probably a reasonably reliable picture of local authority telecare use at the present time.\u00a0 A full report of the findings of this survey is available<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amongst other findings, the webinar reported on the following findings from this survey:<\/p>\n