The Strategic Society Centre has published a major piece of quantitative social research – with the support of [telecare service provider] Age UK – to map users of personal alarms and alerting devices among the older population in England. It estimated that there are at least a million telecare users aged 60+ in England. the majority being women over 70 who live alone but there is scope for many more to benefit. More results of the survey in the Guardian: Millions of people could benefit from telecare. Less informative Age UK item.
UPDATE 12:00: A little bird who attended the launch event tells us that they extrapolated potential telecare users based on the possession of ‘alarms and alerters’ and ‘personal alarms’ questions in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) data from 2008 and that SSC admitted that the definition of those two terms is vague.
Didn’t the TSA telecare survey report suggest that the number of UK users could be as high as 1.8 million?
Is this report now generally available somewhere?