Telecare eNewsletter December 2013
Welcome to the December 2013 newsletter from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) Knowledge Transfer Network and the Telecare Learning and Improvement Network. We are grateful to the HealthTech & Medicines KTN and the TSB's Assisted Living Innovation Platform for providing newsletter funding for another year enabling us to continue to provide the most comprehensive newsletter available serving the telecare, telehealth, mobile health, digital health and assisted living communities.
Launched October 2005, our free monthly newsletter is now distributed to 48,000 subscribers in the UK and worldwide via e-mail and archived at www.telecarelin.org.uk. You can also find highlights on Prezi (monthly) or Rebelmouse (daily) or by following Mike Clark on Twitter (@clarkmike). With over 900 news and events links over the last month, we hope that you find this newsletter useful.
As the winter months begin, the pressures on A&E services are starting to mount. Significant additional funding to handle this winter has been put in place in England (see additional December supplement). It is important that telecare services across the UK are contributing to supporting people at home and in the community and hopefully where telehealth services have been shown to be cost-effective they are helping people self-manage their conditions. We need to progress further before we can see evidence of health apps contributing to reducing the current health & care pinch-points but it is vital that people get the appropriate treatment in the right place and there is certainly scope for mobile health to have impact in future years. Transformational change will need to take place as NHS England investigates seven day working. Health and Wellbeing Boards will be signing off their plans under the £3.8bn Better Care Fund (as it is now called) in January prior to the 15 February 2014 deadline. The Care Bill was back in the House of Commons on 16 December and this will put further pressure on social care as they are likely to have to identify and track hundreds of thousands of current care self-funders. Finally, there are prospects of a significant step forward with the recent G8 Dementia Summit - get the news updates this month and read more in the dementia supplement in January 2014.
The newsletter contains a list of KTN/ALIP activities, conferences and workshops from the UK and Europe over the coming weeks as well as news from the UK and around the world. For weekly news, updates and information, you can register with the Technology Strategy Board, ALIP group and the dallas sub-group. You can follow the dallas programme on Twitter at @dallas_connect. 3 Million Lives is on LinkedIn. You can also access a Twitter Stream via the TelecareLIN website.