Digital innovation brings important benefits to social care

The wealth of digital technology and equipment being introduced to support people using social care services is making a real difference across Bedford, Central Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes.

The exciting innovations are being used to help improve care and enable residents to stay independent in their own home for longer. They include:

• a chair that can be built around a person to lift them from the floor after a fall
• a ‘virtual assistant’ that checks a person’s wellbeing and daily routines to help them stay safe and well at home
• a monitoring device that helps prevent falls by alerting care home staff to a resident’s sounds and movements
• technology that lets people with long-term conditions have their health monitored remotely while staying in their own home
• a system that helps care home staff closely monitor the health of residents, enabling them to catch problems early
• a project offering over-55s a free smartwatch or fitness band and smart scales to help researchers develop a way to prevent people suffering falls.

For care services, there’s now:

• funding of up to £3,500 to help set up a digital social care record – secure, digital recording of a person’s care records, enabling relevant information to be shared securely with authorised health and care professionals to provide better, safer care
• free, expert advice on keeping people’s information safe in the digital world
• a safer, easier and quicker way of ordering repeat prescriptions online on behalf of residents.

Clare Steward, Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care System Programme Director of Social Care Digitisation, said: “We’re excited for these technologies to help improve services for residents by keeping them as safe and well as possible within the community, provide support to care providers and their staff, and help ease some of the pressure on our ambulance and accident and emergency services.”

To find out more about these new digital developments, visit our digitising social care programme web pages.