Digital Telecare Alarm Receiving Centre Upgrade

Across the UK, the Telecare landscape has remained largely unchanged for decades, with most services and projects focusing largely on equipment. The upcoming migration to Digital by 2025 provides TEC (Technology Enabled Care) Cymru with a chance to transform the Telecare landscape. The ambition is to use this project to understand and develop an approach for further scaling across Wales.

The Vale of Glamorgan Council were the first to announce that they will be upgrading their Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) from analogue to a SaaS-based digital ARC. As the smallest ARC in Wales, the project provides TEC Cymru with a valuable insight into the opportunities and pitfalls that digital migration provides, as well as informing our development of a model Migration Strategy which can be used to assist further ARCs to complete their migration to digital on a larger scale.

Project Aims

The main aim of the project is to ensure that the Vale telecare service can receive calls via Internet Protocol (IP). With the analogue network scheduled to be shut-off by 2025, and the periodic upgrade of analogue in-home equipment (landline phones) already underway across Wales, there is a need to support vulnerable telecare service users who are unaware of the impending impact.

Beyond this, the other aim is to embed 4 Projects called ‘Beyond Digital’, focused on ensuring the project does not simply become a like-for-like telecare ARC upgrade, in order to maximise the possibilities digital connectivity and functionality brings to Welsh telecare services. These projects are:

- Citizen Journey

- Minimum Telecare Datasets

- Business Intelligence Dashboard

- National Common Telecare Record