Housing Proactive Case Study – The St Monica Trust

The St Monica Trust provides homes for 1300 residents who live in its five retirement villages and four care homes across Bristol and north Somerset.

The Trust, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2025, was originally set up by the Wills family to provide homes for returning missionaries to live in during their old age.

Often its sites will have sheltered accommodation and a care home in the same location so people can move from one to the other with minimum disruption to their lives. This can also allow them to maintain contact with friends or spouses who are living on the same site but with different needs. The Trust also ensures its residents remain connected to the wider community by incorporating facilities such as cinemas, swimming pools, cafes and restaurants to attract people into its villages.

The St Monica Trust is always actively seeking to build partnerships with charities, local people and other organisations to fulfil its aims. It has been working with Alertacall since 2011.

The challenge

The St Monica Trust has been using Alertacall’s OKEachDay service to keep residents safe and maintain regular two-way contact for many years.

However, they wanted to upgrade to Alertacall’s Housing Proactive service to provide a wider range of benefits to their residents. In April, Alertacall worked with the Trust to upgrade the system and install Housing Proactive at 550 properties across four of its retirement villages.

How did Alertacall help?

Housing Proactive is delivered via an easy-to-use, portable touchscreen, which can be quickly and conveniently installed in people’s homes.

Each resident is given a touchscreen on a stand, which they can use from the comfort of their armchair and encourages more engagement than a device attached to the wall.

The touchscreen includes the OKEachDay service and also gives residents different options for communicating with their village management team, either via text, call or by sending recorded voice messages. In return, the Trust can send messages and important news and updates to its residents quickly and easily.

The touchscreens operate using multi-network SIM cards and have been developed especially with older people in mind. They are easily connected to mains power in the most convenient location without the need for extra wiring.

An easy transition

Alertacall held workshops for residents at each of the Trust’s retirement villages where Housing Proactive has been installed to show them how to use the touchscreen and answer any questions.

Our dedicated team then visited each resident to set up their touchscreen individually in their home. We also worked with staff to make sure the technology could integrate effectively with their existing IT systems.

“It is so easy to set up and the transition has been really simple, Katy, from Alertacall, came and did a demo for all of the residents and answered their questions and it worked out really, really well” says Ruth Taylor, Village Manager at the St Monica Trust’s Cote Lane Retirement Village.

Looking forward to the future

Alertacall’s touchscreens and Housing Proactive have been designed to be adaptable so they can be integrated with any other new technology the Trust introduces as part of its digital agenda.

We are looking forward to continuing our excellent relationship with the St Monica Trust and working with its fantastic and caring team long into the future.

“The process of installation was really quite smooth and the installation team was so professional. I was really impressed with the way that they interacted with residents.
The touchscreens are a great base for us to move on and increase resident communication. We see it as a core piece of equipment for us to increase our engagement” commented Garry O’Sullivan, Project Manager at the St Monica Trust.

Click here to read the full case study, including more quotes from the St Monica Trust.

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