In 2010 the City of London became the first city in Canada to join the World Health Organization’s Global Network of Age Friendly Cities. The city still says so on its own seniors’ pages, and it is a useful thing to know about the place. Every other Canadian city that has since joined that network followed London into it.
Bedford Medical Alert® covers a narrower piece of the same problem. We are Canadian-owned and operated with 24/7 monitoring based in Canada. When a member presses their button, a trained operator answers and works through the response plan that member’s family helped write in advance, calling the people on it in the order the family chose.
This page is about growing older in London specifically. The hospitals families come home from, the programs that can help with the cost, and how to choose between a home unit and something that goes out the door with you.
The Age Friendly London Network is not a slogan on a letterhead. It runs on 165 members and 80 local agencies organized into eight working groups, and the City created a seniors’ resources site for London and Middlesex in partnership with it. The Network holds a conference every fall, and the 2026 edition is booked for October 14.
All of that is daytime infrastructure. Accessible buildings, transit, programs, volunteers, a phone number that answers between nine and five.
None of it is standing in the hallway at four in the morning when someone gets up and does not make it back to bed. That is the narrow gap a monitored button is built for, and it is usually why the first call to us comes from an adult child rather than from the person who will be wearing the device.
London Health Sciences Centre is the city’s largest employer. It is home to University Hospital, Victoria Hospital and Children’s Hospital, plus the Kidney Care Centre and two family medical centres. Its physicians, residents and staff number close to 15,000, and LHSC reports having cared for more than one million patients in the past year. It describes itself as an acute care teaching hospital looking after the most medically complex and critically ill patients in its region.
St. Joseph’s Health Care London handles a different stretch of the same journey. Parkwood Institute on Wellington Road South is where St. Joseph’s runs rehabilitation and complex care, veterans care, and, in the Finch Family Mental Health Care Building on the same campus, specialized mental health care. It is where a great many Londoners spend the weeks between a hospital bed and their own kitchen.
The handover to home is the thin part of all of this. A discharge summary and a follow-up appointment are not the same thing as somebody being in the room. We wrote a general checklist for that period at coming home from the hospital, and the sequence a button press actually sets off is laid out at what happens when you press a medical alert button.
One thing stated plainly, because it matters. Bedford is an independent Canadian company. Naming LHSC and St. Joseph’s on this page is local context for London families and nothing more. It is not a claim of partnership, affiliation or endorsement by either organization. What Bedford can point to is this: we are a member of the Ontario Community Support Association, we are trusted by clinicians across Canada, and we have supported hospital education programs and research initiatives from UHN Toronto Rehab to Trillium Health.
Not sure which setup fits a London household? Call Bedford Medical Alert at 1-888-755-3055 and we will talk it through with you. No long-term contract, and no pressure to decide on the call.
London carries something most Ontario cities do not. Parkwood Institute runs St. Joseph’s Veterans Care Program, 141 beds across three units, providing long-term care and complex care for Canadian war veterans and members of certain civilian groups. Veterans Affairs Canada decides who is eligible. Parkwood also hosts an Operational Stress Injury Clinic, one of ten in the Canadian Operational Stress Injury National Network, funded by Veterans Affairs Canada and serving clients from across southwestern Ontario and well beyond it.
That has a practical consequence for cost. Veterans Affairs is one of the third-party programs under which Bedford’s services are funded or approved for people who qualify, alongside some Blue Cross plans, ODSP and the Passport Program, a range of community programs, and others besides. Bedford is as likely as any other provider to be funded.
What we cannot do is the paperwork. Program approvals generally reach us through a case worker or a care coordinator, and the eligibility rules belong to the program rather than to us. If someone has told a London family that a device might be covered, the useful next question goes back to them.
The practical question splits along one line: how much of the day does this person actually spend at home?
Home Freedom is the in-home system, a base unit with a pendant, built for someone whose day happens inside the house and the yard. For an Old South century home with a steep basement staircase and three steps up to the front porch, that is usually the right fit.
Go Anywhere is the mobile side, either a GPS pendant or a watch, for the person still walking a stretch of the Thames Valley Parkway most mornings or catching a bus up to Masonville. Location comes from the device rather than from a fixed address.
Silver Shield is different from both and worth understanding correctly. It is a wall-mounted millimetre wave radar sensor. Nothing is worn and there is no camera. It is not monitored by Bedford staff. It alerts family and caregivers automatically according to protocols the family sets, and the 24/7 in its description refers to the sensor and its AI rather than to an operator on a headset.
On automatic fall detection generally: the technology reads motion patterns and can call for help without a button press, and no system detects every fall. We explain the mechanism in general terms at how automatic fall detection works. To see the two main streams beside each other, Home Freedom vs Go Anywhere sets out the differences.
Fall Detection technology does not detect falls with perfect accuracy.
There is no long-term contract. Plans run month to month or annually, whichever the customer prefers, with a three month minimum at the start and optional savings on a six or twelve month initial term. Service reverts to month to month after that. There are no cancellation fees. Equipment is included with the subscription, so there is no separate device to buy.
Bedford holds a 4.9-star Google rating and brings three generations of experience to this work. That history is the reason our operators follow more intricate response protocols than is typical for this industry.
Easy Setup is the design goal, and the equipment arrives ready to go. The part that deserves real thought is the response plan: who gets called, in what order, who holds a spare key, whether the neighbour across the street should come before the son in Kitchener.
That conversation is short. It is also the whole difference between owning a device and having a service. Bedford publishes the same local guide for medical alert systems in Hamilton, one city east along the 403. Our medical alert systems in Kitchener and Waterloo page does the same for the region up the 401. And our medical alert systems in Windsor page covers the border city at the highway’s far end.
See how the Home Freedom system works, or call Bedford Medical Alert at 1-888-755-3055 to set one up for a London address. Month-to-month plans, with the equipment included in the service.
Tell us a little about your situation and a Bedford specialist will call you back, usually the same day. No pressure, no obligation.
