Liverpool builds Feel Good Factory

Liverpool Primary Care Trust has been awarded a Technology Strategy Board grant of £7.7m to develop an independent living programme for the elderly using telehealth.

The Feel Good Factory will use technologies from Philips and Tunstall to design lifestyles and home environments around individuals and support them to live at home for longer.

The PCT wants to make better use of telehealth equipment already in circulation and deploy 4,000 more devices over three years.

The Technology Strategy Board awarded four projects funding of £25m as part of the DALLAS programme (delivering assisted living lifestyles at scale).

The Liverpool project was awarded the largest grant, of £7.7m over three years. The PCT and its partner organisations, including Informatics Merseyside, will contribute another £10m between them.

Liverpool PCT director of stakeholder engagement Andy Hull said the Feel Good Factory was about using technology to help people live healthy lives and reduce expensive unplanned hospital visits.

The project will recruit 150 community health champions to design bespoke packages for people with long term conditions including lifestyle advice, self-management advice and equipment. These “frequent fliers” will be identified through GP lists.

The lifestyle plans will not be dependent on funded technology available through the NHS or local council, but will include items such as call alarms that can be bought at a local department store.

Hull said the programme will expand the use of Philips Motiva technology, which helps people monitor their health and gives them advice through the television.

“We have a couple dozen patients whose health and wellbeing are being transformed by use of this equipment,” he explained.

Patients who were previously in and out of hospital every week were now only going in once or twice a year.

“For Merseyside and Liverpool, this is the implementation of the 3millionlives scheme [the Department of Health initiative to kick-start the telehealth market],” Hull added.

“We are doing this at the kind of scale and confidence to feel quite genuinely that we are not going to come out of the three years with the system the same shape as it was when we went into it.”

The voluntary champion role has been designed to prepare people for working in the newly emerging care industry and may link in with government schemes to “upskill” unemployed people and get them into work, he added.

Technology Strategy Board lead specialist, assisted living innovation platform, Jackie Marshall-Cyrus, said that that one of the fundamentals of the DALLAS programme is that technology is not a panacea. 

Instead, it is a tool to get organisations to where they want to go and for people to get better access to health and social care.

“The Liverpool programme – The Feel Good Factory – espouses the values that we had as an overall vision for the DALLAS programme,” she said. The project goes live today.

The other winners of DALLAS funding were:

i-Focus – a nationwide programme offering people a range of products and services to help them feel more comfortable in their homes.

The Warm Neighbourhoods scheme uses on-line and mobile technologies to enhance and organise informal care networks that help families, friends and neighbours to support others in the community in a practical way.

Year Zero – an online application that empowers individuals to actively manage their health information from cradle to grave.

The tools include a digital version of the paper-based ‘Red Book’ that is given to all new parents to record their child’s health, Family Health Tree, to help people plot their family’s health genealogy, and Rally Round, a social networking and planning tool to connect family, friends, carers and health and care professionals.

Living It Up – focuses on developing innovative solutions that will enable people in communities across Scotland to live happy, healthy and safe lives, enabling choice and better control over their health and wellbeing.

The Hidden Talents element also encourages people to identify their talents and share them with other members of the community.