I’ve been sitting on this press release from Imperial College about its involvement with the WSD Programme for a week to see if its appearance marked a relaxation of DH’s policy of keeping the lid on any national publicity about the programme. But no, there is no new information on the DH website and, except for Cornwall Council continuing to post its local project newsletters on its website, there has been no other news about the programme for months.
For new and non-UK readers, a note of explanation: the UK Department of Health’s ambitious Whole System Long Term Conditions Demonstrator (WSD) Programme has been 18 months under construction and is intended to produce solid evidence of the cost effectiveness of large scale deployment of telehealth and telecare on the whole health and social care system. The trials are supposed to be live and collecting data from this month but the Department of Health is, by all accounts and unusually for such a good-news-story-hungry organisation, keeping the participants ‘gagged’ from releasing any publicity about it.
So what’s the bad news the Department wants to hide?
You can review the history of the project, and see the few bits of information that have leaked out, by typing WSD into the Telecare Aware search box, above right.