HC-ONE CCTV Cameras in Care Homes - Video Graphic of Survey Results.

Care home group HC-ONE have surveyed over 12,000 people including residents, their family members re feelings towards CCTV cameras in care homes.

It's a highly emotive subject with supporters on both sides of the camp, but the results of the largest survey on the topic are now in.

Watch our video of the survey results here:

For more information about the use of CCTV in care homes please read this article from Nurse Blog International.

We've asked industry expert James Wickes for his views.

The results from the HC-One survey into the use of CCTV systems in Care Homes were in a word “stunning”.

…Well,  I’m stunned by them.

What’s stunned me is that most people’s perception of how CCTV systems are used is generally based on the monolithic CCTV control room model (lots of officious people staring obnoxiously at banks of screens) – and that’s not a pretty thought in a residential home.

With this general perception out there the survey results looked pretty good for CCTV.

Huge reductions in the cost of remote (cloud) computing and data storage combined with significantly lower CCTV camera hardware costs means that it’s recently become possible to record and spirit away vast amounts of visual data from CCTV cameras and store it for long periods of time at relatively low cost.

This means that CCTV cameras or systems connected to cloud services can offer some compelling advantages over regular CCTV systems in a care home setting.

The over-arching advantage of Cloud based CCTV systems is that large amounts of visual data can be reliably and securely stored off-site for very long periods of time if necessary. So a system can be set to record and forgotten until something happens that needs to be investigated. This simple technology shift transforms CCTV from being something that is potentially quite intrusive into something no more intrusive than a safety air bag in a car – (It’s there and it will do its job if need be but, you will probably never need it).

The survey raised some specific concerns around privacy for residents, access to the footage, who watches the footage, where in the home are the cameras used, where is the footage stored?

And this is where Cloud-based CCTV systems really come into their own. One or many thousands of cameras can be attached to Cloud systems – there’s no limit. This means a 10,000 room care home organisation could have a camera in each resident’s room. Each with a different contract, each with different recording schedules, privacy and alerting parameters, each with different combinations of authorised users with varying permission levels relating to what alerts they may receive, how they receive them and when and what footage they can see and what they can do with that footage.

Every action is recorded and auditable.

All visual data is transferred to remote servers across encrypted communications links and encrypted again when it is stored in datacentres that rival Fort Knox in their physical security. In other words – don’t even think about tampering with it, or deleting it and don’t waste your time trying to hack it.

Deploying regular hardware-based monolithic CCTV systems on a large scale on an opt-in basis is a massive ask financially – in fact, if it happens in the care home world I’ll eat my hat and boots. However, the level of scalability, flexibility and accountability that modern cloud-based CCTV system can now economically offer means that if opt-in CCTV becomes the norm in residential care, it will be Cloud CCTV that has made it happen!

There is no other way.

James Wickes is the CEO of Cloudview a corporate-grade surveillance solution, designed to deliver the benefits of IP and cloud-based technology without the associated costs or complexity. By connecting cameras through a simple plug-and-play adapter to the Cloudview system, the up-front investment traditionally associated with CCTV installations is minimised. Quick to deploy and easy to use, Cloudview leads the way with a scalable, flexible and affordable platform to collect, manage and act upon CCTV footage through a browser from anywhere in the world.

Please take a look at the Cloudview website here.