Why Use a Community Alarm?

A lady who looks after her mother was telling me about her mother's experience with the Community Alarm, which is a telephone based system with a pendant with a button which is pressed to summon help in an emergency. Her elderly mother was most reluctant to have any form of monitoring and hated wearing the pendant. One day the lady had to go to another town to visit a relative and made sure before she left that her mother was wearing the pendant in spite of her mother's protests. As it happened, the mother had a nasty fall during the day and luckily wearing the pendant, she was able to call for help and medical assistance. She is a lot happier to wear her alarm now. This story highlighted to me how important it is for elderly people to have a community alarm and I spoke to Sheila Field, the Supported Housing Co-ordinator, at the Warwick Response Control centre in Leamington Spa about how the system works.