north west expansion for mental health services

Mental health charity, Making Space, has adopted Housing Proactive, an Alertacall service, to ensure daily contact is maintained with hundreds of its tenants across Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. In developing this partnership, the charity primarily aims to improve tenant communication while also enabling those with higher mental health needs to have a greater level of independence in terms of managing their property.

Established in 1982, Making Space is a national charity set up to improve the lives of people with mental health conditions and their carers and they now also work with people with dementia, learning disabilities and older people with age related concerns. Following the success of an initial pilot with Housing Proactive, the charity has now extended its service agreement to cover multiple locations across the North West of England.

Housing Proactive is a housing management system which provides a range of services centred around improving communication with higher needs residents. Daily contact from Housing Proactive is controlled by individual tenants using specially designed devices installed at their property, in conjunction with a highly trained contact centre team. The devices interface through the mobile or fixed line network, and provide a range of useful property management reports, including occupancy tracking, to help organisations better focus resource and to streamline their service provision.

Making Space provides services for tenants housed across multiple housing providers, and each device has been programmed to connect the tenant directly to their respective maintenance team. This, in addition to the non-intrusive daily property checks undertaken via Housing Proactive, makes it easy for tenants to report their own repairs, better manage issues at their own property and helps Making Space promote independent living.

Furthermore, Housing Proactive makes it easy for the team at Making Space to schedule and broadcast property related messages relating to tenants across large geographical areas. Messages can be grouped by location, housing provider or even scheduled to go out on an individual basis. The system also allows the rapid distribution of information in emergencies, for example in the event of a power cut.

Martin Cutbill, Director at Alertacall, commented:

‘We are delighted to be working with Making Space to improve how they communicate with tenants across the North West and increase repairs performance. Housing Proactive has been designed to specifically assist housing providers to deliver enhanced property management services to those living with mental health conditions, learning disabilities, dementia and older people with age-related concerns. The  management information helps housing providers to determine how to best allocate resources.  For Making Space it is a major contribution to achieving their objective of enabling people to stay in their own homes for as long as possible.’

Sharon Fairhurst, Director of Services at Making Space, added:

‘We introduced Housing Proactive to improve how we communicate and interact with our client base across the North West. By using the OKEachDay button, tenants are given greater autonomy over the levels of daily contact they receive from Alertcall, whilst the messaging service will enable our teams to send out important information across the region – particularly useful given the geographic spread of properties. Importantly the devices used to deliver the service are all equipped with a ‘Repairs button’ making it easier for tenants to report any housing related issues to their housing provider and better manage the upkeep of their properties – which in turn helps foster a greater sense independence for all our tenants.

For more information on Alertacall’s services, email contact@alertacall.com or call 0808 208 1234.