I’m now coming up on 2 months in Tunstall — and this month I had the pleasure of visiting colleagues in Madrid, Spain. It's been a rainy/cold summer in London, so I was especially looking forward to the 40°C weather in Madrid. Call me crazy, but I love the heat.
Aug 7, 2023
The trip was a whirlwind, but I was lucky to visit one of our Alarm Response Centres firsthand and experience the end-to-end proactive support our colleagues provide across the city of Madrid. Tunstall directly supports over 40,000 individual citizens across Madrid alone. Unlike many countries where response centres assist individuals in emergency situations, our support operators in Spain proactively reach out to users, especially those over 65 and living alone.
I witnessed this proactive support firsthand while shadowing one of our call centre operators. Through a play-by-play live translation, I realised this is population health management in action, and it's precisely why I joined Tunstall. While I enjoyed the 40°C heat, vulnerable individuals face increased risks in such temperatures. Our teams were calling at-risk individuals proactively, reminding them of healthy behaviours like staying hydrated and out of the sun, and ensuring they knew how to activate support if they felt unwell. These public health messages change throughout the year in partnership with Madrid City Council.
I also got to chat with the clinical team who is supporting individuals across Madrid within the same programme. Madrid City Council has begun pilots to enable the at-home monitoring of key clinical indicators as part of their telecare service. Measures such as blood pressure, pulse rate, and oxygen saturation are tracked along with questionnaires about their state of health. Alongside our support operators, our clinicians are monitoring these vulnerable individuals and when values are out of range—the clinical team proactively responds. One of the nurses on the team walked me through the protocols—and the focus on ‘empowering’ the user to manage their health proactively on a daily basis.
I had the chance to meet with some of our team supporting citizens outside Madrid and learn about their interesting programmes. Tunstall's vision is "A world where people have the freedom to live life to the full in a place of their choice." One programme that caught my attention embodied this vision.
Riolobos is a remote municipality about 250 km west of Madrid, with fewer than 1,500 residents. The team shared the vision of this small town - focused on supporting elderly residents and avoiding rural depopulation. The Mayor of the town aims to build the streets ‘like the corridors of a care home, allowing people to stay at home with the help of technology.’ To support this, Tunstall provides various technologies for both residents and village staff, enabling them to support the elderly as if they were wardens in a care home. Though the programme is small, it truly represents Tunstall's vision in action.
From day one, one of the principles I shared with the Tunstall team is that if we want to accelerate integrated health and care through technology, we must embody partnership working ourselves. I'm excited, therefore, about the partnership the Spanish team has developed with Medtronic to support proactive health and care monitoring through a virtual ward programme. Since 2019, Tunstall has been working in partnership through the Better@Home programme to provide telemedicine and clinical telemonitoring for post-surgical patients. The results have been impressive, with measurable reductions in at-home doctor and nurse visits and readmission rates. Having come from Oracle Cerner, I was particularly pleased to see the interoperability between the at-home monitoring platform and the core Electronic Patient Record. Interoperability is how technology companies such as Tunstall can help accelerate health and care integration and I’m glad to see we’re already on this journey.
The team has been incredibly welcoming and passionate about the opportunity we have to better support vulnerable individuals at home. Next month, I'm heading to Denmark and Sweden to meet the teams there. Like Spain, the Nordics have pioneered integrated health and care, and I look forward to learning more about their work first hand.
Muchas gracias!
Patricia Wynn
Chief Health & Care Strategy Officer, Tunstall Healtcare
