NHS England has published guidance around technology enabled care (TEC) referrals, providing direction on how urgent community response (URC) and TEC provision can be linked, including guiding principles designed to support understanding of how to establish and maintain pathways from TEC providers into UCR, and “gold standard” case studies.
The guidance emphasises the need to understand who and where TEC providers and UCR services are, which includes ensuring that TEC providers are certified to the relevant quality standards framework, establishing points of contact for both, and using data where possible to understand the size of the opportunity that a pathway presents. NHSE suggests that this data could include information such as overall volume of calls, the time of day that calls are made and health inequalities.
Providers are urged to develop their understanding of what provision is already in place by undertaking a mapping exercise, designed to understand the services available locally, the hours of operation, capacity and how referrals are made.
“Once the current pathway is identified, UCR services and their locally operating QSF-accredited TEC responder services should collaboratively start to develop and implement the referral routes and pathways,” NHSE states.
The guidance goes on to provide direction around development of the project team and the pathway itself, as well as implementation guidance and suggestions on training and reviewing the service.
Moving on to the “gold standard pathways”, NHSE shares an example from Dudley, where non-clinical operators at Dudley Telecare receive alarm calls and then assess and refer to appropriate pathways. This included the TEC Responder Service working in collaboration with the UCR team, arranging to meet jointly at a property where needed.
“In the space of little more than a month, a collaboration between Dudley Telecare and Urgent Community Response teams has seen the number of ambulance callouts for injured fallers reduced by 85 percent,” NHSE states. “To date, all callouts alongside UCR teams have been reached within 45 minutes.”
More case studies are shared here.
To read the guidance in full, please click here.
Earlier this week, we shared how NHSE published a £16 million prior information notice for the provision of ‘Tiger Teams’ to support electronic patient record delivery.
Last month, we reported on the news that NHSE has written to trusts, ICBs, and regional directors, outlining updates on planning for 2024/25.
