Seeing Integrated Care from the Inside: Reflections from a First ICIC

In this insight, Saray Velert-Jiménez reflects on her first ICIC conference as part of the IFIC team, exploring how seeing integrated care in action deepened her understanding of community, trust, psychological perspectives and the relationships that make care feel connected.

When you start working at the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC), you hear about integrated care constantly – in meetings, in documents, in the questions colleagues ask each other, in the work itself. You come to understand it better. What you do not quite anticipate is how different it feels to encounter it at scale, across three days, through the voices of hundreds of people who have dedicated their careers to making it real. ICIC26 in Birmingham was my first IFIC conference, and the gap between knowing about something and actually being immersed in it turned out to be larger than I expected.

A community, not just a conference

Walking into that first session, the scale alone was striking. Parallel sessions running simultaneously across multiple rooms, workshops, site visits, plenaries, poster walks – and the constant, slightly enjoyable problem of having to choose. I met students, researchers at the beginning of their doctoral studies, and practitioners who have been building integrated care systems for decades. What surprised me was how fluidly knowledge moved between those groups. The conference did not feel hierarchical; it felt like a community genuinely trying to work something out together.

My doctorate in psychology focused on mental health digital therapeutic tools, so I was naturally drawn to sessions on mental health, behaviour change, person-centred care, and digital health innovation. What became clear, quickly, is that psychological perspectives are not a niche within integrated care. How people experience transitions between services, how trust is built (or broken) between health and care professionals, people receiving care and unpaid carers, why self-management support works in some contexts and not others: these are fundamentally psychological questions, and they came up again and again across sessions that were ostensibly about policy, workforce, or system design.

Deepening what you know – and broadening what you do not yet know

One of the things a conference like this does particularly well is give you permission to be curious beyond your existing territory. There were sessions I attended because the topic felt familiar and I wanted to go deeper. But there were others that touched on areas I was less familiar with, and those turned out to be some of the most rewarding. The session on decolonising integrated care was a good example, drawing on experiences from Ghana, Sudan, and the Arab region to explore how curricula and institutional practices are being reimagined to centre local knowledge and challenge entrenched power dynamics. What struck me as much as the presentations themselves was the quality of the questions from the audience, and the space the session created for perspectives that do not get talked about enough yet.

Seeing it for yourself

I was also lucky enough to join two site visits. At Washwood Heath Health and Wellbeing Centre in East Birmingham, I saw what it looks like when services are brought together around a community: an integrated neighbourhood team, diagnostics, and same-day emergency care, all in one place. Places like this matter for mental health too. When someone does not have to repeat their story to five different professionals, when their GP and their mental health worker and their social care coordinator actually talk to each other, when care feels continuous rather than fragmented, that in itself reduces anxiety. It builds the kind of trust that, for example, makes people more likely to ask for help before a crisis, rather than after.

At Ikon Gallery, the What are the odds? exhibition was genuinely moving. It showed, through art, how institutions can shape an entire life – from infant feeding to dying well, to the near-invisibility of people with learning disabilities in long-stay settings. Sometimes that kind of truth lands differently when it is not written in a report.

Connecting in person

It was also good to see the Integrated Care Academy's work present throughout the conference, and to meet people in person – some who had engaged with our programmes, others who were curious about them. Our three programmes are delivered online, which means we regularly connect with participants from very different countries and contexts. But there is something that online interaction does not quite replicate, and putting faces to names was one of the quieter pleasures of the week! Conversations at ICIC26 were a good reminder of why that kind of learning community matters.

A first time, not a last

Attending ICIC26 as part of the IFIC team was, above all, a reminder that integrated care is not an abstract concept; it is built in specific places, by specific people, through relationships that take time to form. As a psychologist, that is perhaps the part that resonates most: the evidence has long told us that continuity, trust, and being genuinely heard are not soft extras in care; they are the thing itself. I left Birmingham with more questions than I arrived with… and I think that is probably the right outcome!