Health & Social Care

And rural areas such as ours have specific challenges in addressing healthy ageing. Patients often have to travel a long way to access key services whilst care providers can struggle to make their offer viable.

Innovative healthcare offers the opportunity to address health and social care challenges in dispersed populations such as ours. It can revolutionise care commissioning and provision through data driven prevention and remote monitoring.

The Marches has emerging capabilities in digital health and assistive technology. The Living Circle provides cloud-based services for health and care organisations. Bronze Labs, a Telford-based company with expertise in the Internet of Things and cloud computing software, has recently launched The Tribe Project. This nationally significant project aims to support NHS and adult social care resourcing through machine learning to identify areas of high resource need and better allocate resources.

Shropshire has been selected as one of nine local authorities in a Government funded programme to explore how technology can shape the future of social care through piloting a data visualisation tool to identify areas of need for care homes and domiciliary care.

Another technology project being trialled in Shropshire brings together the Council, The Lady Forester Centre, UCS, local GPs, the community and large technology companies Hitachi, Microsoft and Amazon to use smart watches, voice activated devices and messaging to support independence amongst vulnerable people.