By: Victoria King-Lowe, Area Manager, Riverside Care and Support

At Riverside, we bring together a range of health and care service models that join together housing and support for people with care needs. These extra care housing services enable us to help people manage their long-term conditions reducing pressure on health services and other primary care providers by supporting people in their own homes, as well as offering a safe and socially active place for people to live.

Our ‘hospital to home’ services also support people back home after a stay in hospital through reablement and guidance around wellbeing and assistive technology solutions like personal arms and systems to monitor people’s welfare.

Irene, 84, moved to Riverside’s Ash Grove service in Birmingham last summer. She previously had her own three-bedroom house but was finding it manage alone, especially getting herself up and down the stairs, and becoming increasingly isolated. Now at our extra scheme, Irene feels much safer, and is much more active, taking part in bingo afternoons and trips to the local garden centre, as well as enjoying safety demonstrations from the local fire service, and ‘Dementia Friends’ information sessions.

Irene said: “Having a pull cord and pendant alarm accessory has given me the peace of mind knowing that assistance is always there from the on-site care team should she fall or need any help. Recently, I fell ill. I felt that had I been living at home I would have ended up in hospital, but instead the team at Ash Grove was able to provide me with round-the-clock care.”

Around one in three people aged over 65 and one in two people aged over 80 fall at least once each year. Falls account for around 40 per cent of all ambulance call-outs, at a cost of more than £200 per ambulance trip*, to the homes of people over 65 and are a leading cause of older people’s use of hospital beds (King’s Fund, 2013).

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 *It is estimated that each ambulance call out costs £223 (New Economy Manchester’s Unit Cost Database – 2013/2014) averaged over all scenarios.