Implementing Telecare
Provide regular feedback to stakeholders

The effort spent on monitoring and review is also intended to provide regular feedback to major stakeholders – they need to know that the project is working well, or that it is experiencing difficulties. It is also a way to identify lessons to guide future action. These range from successes which can be spread more widely to operating problems which need to be resolved if the project is to make progress. The findings from such review processes can be used to build the foundations for future service development, as well as securing commitment and enthusiasm for roll out.

How to do it?

An economical way to do this is to ensure that project team meetings regularly devote time to reviewing progress, and identifying lessons that can be draw from that. This could be as an agenda item itself or perhaps, after a major success or difficulty, setting aside time to identify and record the lessons, using these headings:

• What worked well? Why was that? How can we ensure that is repeated?
• What did not work well? Why was that? What can we do differently next time?

Recording and summarising events and plans can soon become habitual, and helps to ensure a team is continually learning from their experiences. The recording does not have to be in a lengthy formal format, however, it does need to be captured for future reference.

How to communicate?

Major lessons, especially success stories, can be passed to the steering group to ensure the project team’s achievements are recognised. Equally major difficulties should be reported, especially if the project team has identified how it will overcome them in future.

The project team should capture case studies throughout the project to highlight the impact of telecare, including those case studies that did not work and why. These can be used for training and awareness raising purposes.

It is recommended that the project team review the initial phase of the telecare project after a period of time (12 – 18 months) to identify the main lessons learned, drawing out the successes. Above all, this process will identify lessons from the initial roll-out which can guide an extension of the project – the focus is on what plans the project team needs to make to ensure the smooth transition to the next phase – so it may consider issues such as:

• Technology and its suitability
• Processes and their redesign
• Staffing issues
• Resourcing issues

• Download Tool 14 – Lessons Learned Report template [doc 14kb]
• and Tool 15 – Project Highlight Report template [doc 14kb].