As a member of the SmartCare project’s User Advisory Board (UAB), the EFN participated in the third deployment visit that took place in Friuli Venezia Giulia – Italy, on 6 March. The EFN and UAB members were invited to visit two elderly people’s homes in Trieste, and to share their experiences during a workshop with Health Professionals and Social workers involved in the project.
The key aim of this project is to promote: Home care and community care- that is to say, to enhance integrated healthcare and social care by the use of new technologies for telehealth and telemonitoring; and the empowerment of end users and their families. As a result the services offered by Smartcare support integration and self-care by providing an important synergy between the various care providers.
Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) Region is the leader of SmartCareProject and the main coordinator of the European Consortium. Trieste ASS1 has been designated as the operative-executive leader also for Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region. In the FVG Region, 20 districts are involved for service provision and coordination (involving at least 80 healthcare services’ providers) from six Health Authorities.
Nurses play a key role in this deployment site as main coordinators in the identification of patients in need of smartcare and in coordinating the care needed. More responsibilities are given, the innovation in Smartcare supports the care but they remarked how important keeping human contact is and how technology would never replace totally the visits to the patients.
Smartcare allows the patients to be more independent and remain at home longer. Since they started, their hospitalizations have reduced and they state they feel safer and happier of being able to stay at home despite their conditions.
In this project, 200 patients are provided access to the SmartCare platform. They are identified in two different Integrated Care Pathways (ICP): ICP-Discharge (early discharge) and ICP-LTCare (Long Term Care).
The EFN will participate in the next deployment site visit to take place in South Denmark on 5 May 2015.