Welcome to Telecare!
Florence Nightingale once wrote that “Hospitals are an intermediate stage of civilisation” and that “No one should stay in hospital a day longer than necessary.” Most of us – and especially old people and those with chronic disease, who need care over a long period – would greatly prefer to stay in our own homes within our own communities. And nursing is all about “empowering people and helping them to achieve, maintain or recover independence” (RCN 2003). Telehealth and telecare have an enormous potential to enable this to happen.
Shifting the delivery of care from hospitals to community settings is a major imperative for health care in the 21st century. Telehealth brings the expertise of specialists to people remote from the centres of excellence, so enabling access and improving equity in health care. Telecare provides the means to bring care to people instead of having to take people to care.
Telecare includes access to information, physiological monitoring, and management of the environment. Ideally, this should be an integrated system that supports input from a wide range of stakeholders and offers both proactive (monitoring) capability and reactive support for identified needs. Through it …
- access to existing services can be facilitated
- existing services can be expanded to encompass health promotion and maintenance
- new services can be created and delivered
- more patients can be cared for by fewer staff.
For those being cared for …
- their dignity and privacy is respected
- they are given choices about the circumstances in which they live
- they are able to maintain social relationships.
Telecare should not replace human contact. Properly implemented, it has the potential to enhance the quality of face-to-face care – for example, by replacing several rushed routine visits by a community carer with one longer visit that allows the carer to do justice to the client's emotional needs. And it has been shown to save money.
Professor Dame June Clark FRCN