November’s Whole Systems Demonstrator Action Network (WSDAN) newsletter was published on Friday and it’s starting to show some promise in terms of keeping the general world informed about the project’s development. If you didn’t get it, sign up for it. I’m not commenting on all the content.
First, the list of twelve WSDAN member sites has been published. These are sites that will get the ‘inside track’ on the experiences of the three demonstrator sites (Cornwall, Newham and Kent) and will be encouraged to apply emerging lessons to their situations. Some of these places were ones that originally applied to be a demonstrator site and all have interesting experience to pass back to the WSD sites. To take the first three examples, Barnsley has the longest-running experience of substantial users of Docobo equipment. Birmingham has been working with NHS Direct and Pfizer on the ‘Birmingham OwnHealth’ project and Croydon has both an excellent service for people who live at home with dementia [old Telecare Alliance paper], and its ‘virtual wards’ service.
The twelve WSDAN members are:
- Barnsley PCT and Barnsley MBC
- Birmingham East and North PCT and Birmingham City Council
- Croydon PCT, Croydon Council, Croydon Voluntary Action and South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
- East Riding of Yorkshire PCT and East Riding of Yorkshire Council
- Hull Teaching PCT and Hull City Council
- Lancashire County Council and Central Lancashire PCT
- Leeds PCT and Leeds City Council
- Leicester City PCT and Leicester City Council
- Lincolnshire Teaching PCT and Lincolnshire County Council
- Norfolk Social Services and NHS Norfolk
- Nottingham City PCT, Nottingham City Council and Brunel University
- Southampton City PCT and Southampton County Council
Let’s hope that being a WSDAN member doesn’t compromise their freedom to publicise their developments in the way it did for the demonstrator sites.
Second, the WSDAN newsletter contains a link to an article that goes into more detail [previous article] about the difficulties around setting up the project and it is probably worth a few minutes of most readers’ time. Whether that can be said of the accompanying PowerPoint slides you can download, is another matter. They may be stuffed full of useful data, but if that’s what comprised the presentation at the TSA conference I’m glad I didn’t sit through them.