Shared Control Centre
There is increasing pressure on care and emergency services to co-ordinate their work and present a single face to the public. From the public's point of view it is of little relevance that their needs may span two or more municipal departments: housing and social services for example. And there are many cases where a medical condition will create the need for care services at home, and the local surgery and welfare services wish to work together.
The key to harmonising the services is to develop a control centre, which allows the sharing of information between the different professions and agencies.
A second aspect of a shared control centre is the potential to offer citizens a single point of contact. A shared control centre can answer telephone calls 24 hours a day, re-route calls to the relevant agency (or provide information on when the call can be dealt with), log calls and audit responses.
The Safe 21 project will work with three municipalities to develop a shared control centre. It will demonstrate how a number of organisation can access and share information between each other without compromising confidentiality. It will run trials to test the practicalities of several organisations working closely together to provide a more efficient care service for users at home.
How it works
The shared control centre offers a range of communications and data processing facilities that support closer integration of services into a network. Welfare services, health services and emergency services are all part of the network. Calls are initially received by the shared control centre which is manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Control centre staff will forward the call to the relevant agency, aided, in many cases, by information about the caller. Some calls may be automatically re-routed to specialist operators or automated equipment, and simply logged for management purposes.
Operator profiles for customised log-on.
Integral monitoring of: communications server, operator stations, mains power, back-up power, line integrity (ISDN, PSTN &, SMS).
Firewall, encryption, audit trail, controlled access, data back-up.
Search, management reports, statistics, printing & print preview.
Operation with remote databases. Database replication for multi-site operation
Full duplex speech
Safe 21 will demonstrate how the existing social alarm infrastructure can be used to deliver a much broader range of services for people who are living alone. The project runs 1997-1999 with trials of equipment from late 1998.