DRAFT CONTENT
An ambitious new approach to the delivery of health and social care, enabled by technology, is developing within the borders of Manchester City Council.
The creation of the Manchester Local Care Organisation (MLCO) has brought the council’s social care operation together with local NHS primary, community and mental health services to work as one team across the organisations’ boundaries.
They have a vision in which they work together as teams in neighbourhoods and wider localities, and in which technology enabled care is intrinsic to the support for vulnerable people. This places a strong emphasis on using the technology to collect data from a range of devices, bringing it together on a single platform to fulfil three purposes:
- Support people in continuing to live in their own homes rather than going into residential
- Provide an end-to-end approach to care delivery, joining up the contributions of social workers, care providers, NHS staff and others in supporting an
- Provide a single view of the factors affecting an individual, supporting the effort to provide them with a better quality of
As the organisation outlined its plans at an event in January 2019 the details were still taking shape, with plans to experiment with a number of digital solutions and, working with Microsoft, develop a platform into which all of the data could be aggregated, providing that single view and a series of dashboards to support managers and care providers in their efforts.
One solution already in place is a staff scheduling system. It provides managers with information on individual employees, broken down into detail such as their skills, qualifications and which medications they are able to administer, along with a mapping facility to show where they are in the local authority area. It enables them to make decisions about where to send staff to support those in need, responding to any emergencies and ensuring that people receive the nature of care that they need, while helping to reduce travelling time.
The council is working on supporting this by giving care recipients a 4G connected tablet computer that stays in their home, replacing paper records, with all of the information on their care. Visiting staff are able to access the information on the individual to understand what they need and become aware of any risks, and update it during the visit. At the same time the information goes into a web based monitoring platform, under development with Konnektis, that managers and different teams can use to coordinate care; and which family members can access to obtain real time information on the support.
There is a recognition that community groups and charities can make a big contribution to care. One element of the programme is the development of Connect2Support, an online tool that enables people to see what services are available locally. They can input details of their circumstances and the systems quickly identifies key aspects to provide them with the relevant options. It amounts to a digital approach to social prescribing, the direction to non-medical services by GPs that is now seen as an important factor in patients’ wellbeing.
Another initiative involves internet of things specialist Republic of Things and is aimed at combating fuel poverty among older people. It involves installing passive sensors to monitor heat and humidity in people’s homes, with data transmitted through low frequency radio with no need for internet connections, to a standalone platform that alerts social care staff as to whether the person may be living in cold. This can prompt action, working with the Local Energy Advisory Programme, to approach the person with advice about energy saving measures and the options in switching tariffs.
There are possibilities to provide treatment at home. The event showcased what Sword Health, Virtual Rehab and Microsoft HoloLens could do in enabling people to do physiotherapy exercises at home, with the ability to feed data into a platform for the physio to assess their progress and identify when changes are needed in the regime.
Initiatives such as this, focused on transferring care outside the hospital system, can do a lot to take the pressure off the NHS, provide big savings, and help people stay in their homes – a major factor in wellbeing.
Efforts are also being made to support carers. There are around 50,000 in Manchester, easing the pressure on the council and NHS but many of them struggling with their own pressures.
Under an initiative with the Manchester Carers Network – which comprises 21 voluntary organisations – MLCO is working on a learning and development programme that will be available digitally on the Carers UK platform. It will provide a single point of access for helping the carers to find practical solutions, link them to existing groups, direct them to training programmes and enable them to provide better care – while preserving their own wellbeing.
Along with all this is the vision of pulling all the data from different systems onto the single platform to provide managers with insights.
MLCO and Microsoft are working on the provision of real time data on all the issues that can be crucial in providing emergency and long term care: such as how many people are waiting at a hospital’s A&E department; the bed availability in local care homes; and which care staff with specialist skills are in a specific locality.
This can extend to third party sources, such as weather reports, emergency services alerts and social media.
Such factors can be flagged up in the command and control system through a series of dashboards, making it easy for managers to monitor and react to conditions and to support long term planning.
Meanwhile, comprehensive data on an individual provides a clear view of their needs and feeds into a proactive approach to care, which can prevent any deterioration in their circumstances.
It requires a high level of security supported by an identifier for the person, and the legal and governance issues around data sharing have to be resolved through procedures such as data protection impact assessments. But there is a growing body of best practice on these issues and a realisation that the largest risks are in not sharing the data.
Underlying all this is the aim for everyone involved – not just the leaders but all of the organisations’ staff, care providers and people receiving support – to ‘think digital first’. There are already signs of a positive response: a poll conducted during the event showed strong majorities among the MLCO staff present in supporting the different solutions, with the most common description of their feelings being “exciting”, and the agreement that the approach will do a lot to promote collaboration.
This indicates that the organisation and employees of MLCO possess the will to see it through.
If you would like to discuss how Microsoft technologies can help turn data into intelligence to deliver the future of health & social care, contact industry solutions lead for local & regional government at Microsoft, Helena Zaum.
