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Telecare Community Placement

Trent University
Nicole Warren
0492022

Our community based nursing practice placement this term is with the Telecare
Distress Center of Peterborough. I am working with three other nursing students, but am
specifically partnered with Laura Wale.
Telecare was established in 1977 in Peterborough, with the plan to target and help
anyone within Peterborough County that was lonely and/or isolated. The buildings
location is kept secret for protection of the volunteers but is centrally located within
Peterborough City. However, it has since grown to receive calls from Greater Simcoe,
Campbellford, Cobourg, Cambridge, etc., due to partnerships it has formed and based on
need. It is solely volunteer run, so the partnerships were formed between other regions in
the case that a shift couldnt be filled, in order to ensure that the calls can always still be
taken. There is no cost to call the center, so long as the individual can access/afford to use
the phone by which they are calling. Telecares vision statement from their website states,
we are a local call center which offers a non-judgmental, confidential listening ear to
anyone in need. We operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with the help of trained, caring
volunteers willing to listen.
The agency is a stand alone agency, however it is affiliated with other agencies
and the national organization for Telecare. This agency will collaborate with other
agencies during their volunteer training sessions as well. Their budget is mainly
comprised of rent, phone, insurance, etc., which are costs that are cover by annual grants
from the city and through other fundraising ventures. Due to the nature of Telecare, and
the fact that it is solely run by volunteers, people can call Telecare and just vent and talk
as needed, rather than be diagnosed or the person at the other end always trying to fix
their problems. Telecare is limited to telephone only communication, and is only

provided in English out of the Peterborough office. This agency practices to address the
social determinants of health and help people as best as the volunteer can. Statistics from
2013 showed that the majority of callers were individuals with disabilities, who were also
on limited incomes.
The volunteers that work in the agency are typically under thirty or greater than
fifty years of age. Telecare typically receives 40 calls in a 24 hour period, helping 450
500 individuals a year. They received approximately 12,000 calls in 2014 and will
potentially exceed 15,000 calls in 2015. Within this specific agency, there is no
community nurse. Our role then as nursing students here is to gain a perspective of public
resources available, and become aware of all types of individuals that make up a
community.
The clients served by this agency are typically disabled, and over the age of fifty
years old. They are often on social assistance, and calling due to lack of social supports
and loneliness. The social determinants of health that this agency serves includes
disability, employment and working conditions, unemployment and job security, housing,
income, social exclusion, which basically touches on all the social determinants of health.
The agency, due to being run by volunteers, is main focus is to provide support and
occasionally exploration of resources. They are not there to identify health issues or
provide solutions to all presented problems of the caller. The callers are often encouraged
to continue calling back as needed, and the agency will potentially call certain individuals
depending on context and situation.
What the intended overall arching goal for Telecare to have completed by the
students they have this time is the 2014 statistics of the callers, and bringing 2015 to

current. This will require pouring over the individual files of specific frequent callers to
pull out information that will then be numerically coded and used to develop statistics of
the population that utilizes the agency. As well, all of my team members also plan to
complete the 50 hours of training that volunteers take before answering phones, refer to
Appendix A.
The final leg of our placement is to draw up a pamphlet regarding Coping around
Issues of Aging, with the material being geared for the volunteers to read as part of their
training regarding the lived situation of caregivers and the elders themselves. The
methods we will use to draw up this pamphlet will be based off a literature review of
current best practices and research. The beginning of our research has taken us to read an
article by Smale and Dupuis (2004) for the foundation of our knowledge from which we
will begin building our pamphlet. The challenge for us will to create a comprehensive but
simple and clear pamphlet that the volunteers will be able to utilize and learn from.

References
Smale, B.J.A., & Dupuis, S.L. (2004, March). In their own voices: A portrait of dementia
caregivers in Ontario. Final report prepared for the Ministry of Health and LongTerm Care and the Ontario Senior's Secretariat as part of Initiative #6 of Ontario's
Alzheimer Stratety. Waterloo, ON: Murray Alzheimer Research and Education
Program.
Appendix A

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