Website of the Department of Health

Kent, Cornwall and Newham

The three successful Whole System Demonstrator sites - Kent, Cornwall and Newham were announced on 23rd May 2007, and have since been involved in detailed planning and implementation. The sites are currently in the implementation phase and working towards recruiting further participants onto the trial.  The DH programme team have been working closely with the sites, their delivery partners, project management partners and our evaluation consortia to assist with implementation.

Recruitment activity

The recruitment of service users at each site has involved a complex and lengthy process. The process was mandated by the evaluation design and approved by ethics. Briefly this process has involved recruiting GPs, identifying eligible individuals, sending out consent letters, and arranging visits and assessments before participants can be allocated to a control group or have the equipment installed.

The WSD Programme

The WSD Programme is driven by the need to understand the true benefit of integrated health and social care supported by advanced assistive technology (telehealth and telecare). The key to proving the business case is a robust evaluation.  We have pulled together a consortia of UK universities to deliver the evaluation and have worked with them and the sites to agree the methodology and design.  The evaluation will be extremely robust and has been designed as a randomised control trial, focusing on individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure and diabetes, and adults with social care or health and social care needs at risk of hospital admission.  The evaluation will look at the extent to which these assistive technologies:

• promote individual’s long term well-being and independence
• improve individual’s and their carer’s quality of life
• improve the working lives of staff
• are cost effective
• are clinically effective

The evaluation will be complemented by structured lessons learnt to help inform future mainstreaming of this activity.

• Download further detail around the WSD recruitment and evaluation process (PDF, 152K)

WSD sites

All three sites are currently recruiting GPs and participants to take part in the programme.  Thousands of service users will benefit from the programme, making it the largest trial of telecare and telehealth in the UK to date.  Each site will recruit up to 1,000 patients/users for telehealth and up to 1,000 patients/users for telecare.

The sites all differ in terms of their demographics and locations:

• Cornwall – dispered rural population of over 500,000 with more than 10% of people aged 65+
• Newham – one of the most deprived areas in the UK with a small but diverse population of 300,000
• Kent – population of £1.37m with over 300,000 existing telehealth users

• Download further details on each site (PDF, 93K)

Additional resources

Further information about the Whole System Demonstrator programme and some of the telecare and telehealth equipment being trailed can be found in the WSD brochure:

• Whole Systems Demonstrators: an overview of telecare and telehealth