Landlords

How to make sure tenants living alone do not remain undiscovered after death

Whether you have one tenant who lives alone or thousands, an undiscovered death brings expense, problems and bad publicity as well as heartache.

Problems and expenses

  • Clean-up: A MAJOR initial cost and expenditure of time.
  • Refurbishment: A cost you can always do without.
  • Relatives: Time to deal with them; Possible cost of lawsuits.
  • Other tenants: Time to deal with them; Possible voids if they decide to move as a result.
  • Inquest: Time to attend; Cost of representation.
  • Staff loss and training: Large landlords have had to dismiss staff over such incidents and incurred the cost of recruiting new and training staff.
  • Media damage limitation: Expensive executive time for large landlord organisations.

Mitigate the problems and costs

You may not be able to prevent the death but you can mitigate the associated problems and costs that escalate the longer the person is not found.

Outside the UK (at the moment) you may have to rely on identifying the tenants who are at risk and then put in place some kind of daily ‘call you up’ system to ask if they are OK. In the US in particular, there are local voluntary groups who undertake this type of task.

However, in the UK there is a much better system, called Alertacall Safety Confirmation. For a setup cost and a monthly fee, clients are provided with a special large-button phone (suitable for older people) which has a couple of extra buttons. After a simple registration process, the client presses a special button before a pre-arranged time each day. Failure to do so initiates a call to the person from the Alertacall monitoring centre and, if there is no response, a sequence of calls to designated people is triggered so that they can go and see if the client is OK. The button presses can be in the morning or evening or both. If the user wishes, a panic pendant alarm can be included in the service package.

The advantages of the Alertacall system are often not appreciated until it is tried.

Yes, there is the reassurance for clients that help will be summoned if the button isn’t pressed, but the essential benefit is that they have the freedom to come and go and live their lives normally, without worrying about missing their daily ‘checking-up-on-you’ call.

Is Fred dead?

For example, Fred’s button-pressing deadline is 10.00 because he normally gets up at 9.30. But one day he gets up at 7.00 to go on a trip. That’s OK, he just presses the button on his way out.

Another day, because Fred is diabetic and has slipped into a coma, he fails to press the button at 10.00 and help is soon on its way. It does not depend on him coming round enough to press his pendant alarm – if he were wearing it. Which, as usual, he was not!

Fred’s family and friends have discovered other benefits too.  Because they are relieved of the pressure to phone Fred daily with the usually unspoken question of “Are you still with us?” So, when they do call it is now because they have a genuine desire to chat.

Simple, but sophisticated

Alertacall has been designed to be extremely simple for clients but, like all good ’simple’ systems it is controlled by some sophisticated electronics. And yet the cost is less than the typical pendant panic alarm service. Check current prices for individuals at the Alertacall website.

Landlords with just a few tenants who live alone should refer them directly to the Alertacall service: http://www.alertacall.com

Large landlords – many problems

For landlords such as housing associations that have a substantial number of tenants who live alone, the chances of an undiscovered death happening, and the associated costs, are high unless they have an expensive person-based calling system in place. However, Alertacall is not only easy to scale up, but has other benefits for such organisations.

The reason is that the software, Pellonia, that controls the Alertacall service has many other features, such as being able to ‘broadcast’ the organisation’s phone messages to tenants, including to people who are not safety confirmation system customers. This is a powerful, quick and effective means of communicating with tenants and can be built into the service costs.

There is too much to the Alertacall/Pellonia system to go into detail on this website, so visit the Pellonia site for more information.

To sum up…

Undiscovered tenant deaths are not only tragic personal events that can have serious, wide ranging and long lasting damaging effects on friends and family members, but they can seriously damage the credibility of your organisation and have devastating consequences for any staff seen to be at blame.

If you have not read them yet, browse the news stories about people who died and lay undiscovered and also the story behind why this site, ‘Dead and Undiscovered’ came about.