Good practice:

A Telecare Local Service to provide support to senior citizens and dependent people

The Local Telecare Service is a home telecare service that aims to improve the quality of life and autonomy of people who may be in risk due to factors of age, fragility, loneliness, disability or dependency. The service also seeks to detect emergency situations, such as falls or other medical emergencies, and responds immediately to them. Its main purpose is to provide elderly and dependent people, and their families, the security and safety to be cared for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, while increasing comfort and reducing social isolation.
Through the years, the service has aimed to continually innovate and improve. Some of its basic services include calls to get assistance or a necklace with a button to be pushed in the face of an emergency. But new digital complementary services such as devices to detect risks to the health of users or risks at home (e.g. mobility sensors, smoke and gas detectors, fall detector devices, etc.) are also available. Another example currently being tested is the use of smart water meters to detect risks associated with psychological or health problems through the analysis of users' water consumption patterns.
The service is currently being implemented through a public-private partnership between the Barcelona Provincial Council (DIBA), the local public administrations (310 municipalities) and the service provider company.
The main beneficiaries of the practice are the citizens, primarily the elderly and dependent people.

The service is co-financed between the 310 municipalities and DIBA, and it is provided by a private services provider. In 2019, it had an annual budget of €12,368,584.33, of which 47% was funded by DIBA and the other 53% by the municipalities (50-60% of which have some type of co-payment for users).

The Local Telecare Service is provided to some 90,000 users in 310 municipalities in the province of Barcelona, with coverage of 12.8% of the population over 65 years old and 43.6% of the population over 80 years old.
In 2019, the service managed more than four million calls and made over 100,000 home visits. It also has 29 mobile units that allow actions in the territory.
The service has high satisfaction among users, with 4.5 out of 5 in the satisfaction index in the last evaluation.

The main difficulties encountered have been: (a) to estimate the percentage of the population that will need the service -which is key to forecast the service’s growth and to optimize it-; and (b) some technical incompatibilities with different solutions offered by telephone service providers.

Ageing populations is a demographic change happening all over Europe. In fact, Europe is home to the oldest populations in the world, and the challenges related to higher needs for health care, increasing pensions costs and issues related to social isolation of the elderly are common to most European regions. Therefore, we consider this good practice to be potentially interesting for other European regions to learn from, as we all need to provide better health and social services to older populations and dependent people. In addition, the level of technology and infrastructure needed is not very high. Therefore, the potential for replicability and scalability is significant.