Technology Enabled Care - Freedom of information requests

Title or Description: Technology Enabled Care
FOI Number: 78
Date Received: 21/01/2022
Type of Request: FOI
Request or Question: I am looking for information about technology enabled care and support and its use as part of social care in your local authority area. I am looking for this information under freedom of information legislation and as such, would expect to be sent this information within 20 working days.1. Do you currently use technology enabled care and support in your local authority? If so, when was this first introduced?2. How many people have received social care packages with an element of technology enabled care and support:a) since this was introduced?
b) as of January 2022?
3. How many of these packages are in relation to the provision of overnight care?
Response: 1. Scottish Borders Council provides basic technology enabled care through provision of a Community Alarm Service. This service include some enhanced services such as Medication dispensers, GPS enabled alarms and falls detectors. This service has been available for over 25 years with technologies introduced throughout this period. More recently we have trialled some more specialist TEC products but these are not currently in mainstream use.

2. a)b)We currently have 1988 active Community Alarm clients. It is not possible to report on all clients since introduction due to volume of data dispersed over many systems. Therefore we refer to S17 of FOI(S)A 2002 and declare that the information is not held.

3. Scottish Borders Council has considered your request and concluded that the cost of complying with it would be more than £600. Under S12 (1) of FOISA 2002 Scottish Borders Council is not obliged to comply with a request that is estimated to exceed this cost.
It would require manual reading of all case files. It is not possible to report on this due to the volume of clients and time required to analyse the referral reasons.