Telecare Alarm Receiving Centre and Customer Management System

Portsmouth City Council's (PCC) Safe at Home (Telecare) Service would like to investigate the market for a combined package of Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) and customer management System for Telecare alarm monitoring.

Portsmouth City Council provides an in-house Telecare Service branded as "Safe at Home" with approximately 1,000 customers.

All telecare devices installed are SIM operated (digital switch over of equipment was undertaken by the service in 2022).

Telecare equipment provided through the service is SIM-operated units supplied by Chiptech UK, typically the Chiptech SEVEN base units with Pearl/ Pearl Advanced pendant. A range of peripheral equipment is also installed for Safe at Home customers based on identified needs, including (but not limited to):

- Smoke detectors

- Carbon Monoxide detectors

- Epilepsy Monitors

- Door exit monitors

- Bed exit monitors

The safe at home service has also recently introduced GPS e

Licences for approximately 8 officers would be required for the monitoring software for in-house staff to access and update customer records.

Reporting would be required for performance monitoring (not an exhaustive list):

- Call answering times

- Number of calls

- Nature of call and action taken (e.g. no speech, ambulance or responder deployed, false alarm)

- Disconnections

- No activity

An average of 3,650 calls per month are received.

The Council are open to working with the provider to identify scope to reduce the call volume.

We recognise the experience and innovation that suppliers can bring to these services. As such PCC would welcome your organisation's market information, which will be used to enable PCC to draw up a high-quality specification that meets the needs of local authority housing and its residents.