NEWS

Digital Telecare for Scottish Local Government has launched Operational Procedures Guidance within the Digital Telecare Playbook to support Partnerships transition to digital telecare.

The Digital Telecare team have been working closely with colleagues from the Scottish Government TEC Programme, TEC Services Association (TSA), Farrpoint, Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership and East Lothian Council to develop this guidance which identifies the existing operational procedures that will be impacted by the transition to digital and provides Partnerships with best practice steps to implement each change.

The guidance is clearly structured by categorising changes into client facing and back office procedure changes. The Client Facing Procedure changes focus on elements including Assessment, Installation, Maintenance, Fault Reporting, Monitoring, Response and Withdrawal. The Back-Office Procedure changes focus on Business Continuity/ Disaster Recovery, Technology Management/ Asset Management/ System Management, Training and development, Quality/ Management Information and Charging.

As implementations of digital begin to roll out in Scotland, this document will be updated with best practices learned from those initial roll outs. As an example; the current version of the document highlights that Partnerships will need to implement procedures to monitor and respond to the ‘heartbeat’ signals that digital alarm devices send to the Alarm Receiving Centre to confirm that they are operating correctly. A future issue of the document will provide detail of the best practice that Partnerships should implement in their heartbeat signal procedure, for example, the time after which missed heartbeats should be seen as a problem, and what the response should be.

The Operational Procedures Guidance  can be found within the Understand Partnership Responsibilities step on the Technical and Security Pathway of the Digital Telecare Playbook. This should be read in conjunction with the Technology Service Management product also available on this step, which provides details of the changes Partnerships need to make to their technical procedures to accommodate digital telecare. *Please note that you must be signed into the Playbook to access this documentation via this link.

In addition to this guidance, Digital Telecare for Scottish Local Government’s Business Relationship Manager, David Brown, has also produced a useful Insight Service Summary focusing on a number of the key operational procedure changes including SIM Management and Heartbeat Monitoring in more detail.

If you have any questions regarding the Operational Procedures Guidance or the Insight Sight Summary, please get in touch.