ICIC24 Conference Themes

1. Partnerships, collaborations and new alliances

Planning and resource allocation

Using tools and frameworks such as Community-based Planning involving local assets, community expertise and networks to support better collaboration with local government and other community partners
Shifting the allocation of resources across the spectrum of health, social care and other services
Examples of piloting and scaling good programmes or decommissioning failed programmes, understanding public procurement and other structural barriers to making this a reality
How do enablers such as funding and workforce development contribute to the success (or failure) of partnerships and collaboration

Collaboration and partnership

Working with national and regional government to create an integrated vision for better services, that enables local collaboration to deliver better experience of health and care
Working with and learning from commercial organisations, leveraging knowledge from industry, and supporting further development of service provision
Examples of cluster organisations and case studies of communities of practice with innovators
New partnership structures and case studies of community of practice that empower local and community organisations

Improving the population health though new alliances

Working collaboratively to support health promotion, prevention and early intervention to improve health outcomes and wellbeing across the life course and reduce inequalities
Broadening partnerships to include the individual and the informal circle of care around a person, thinking about unpaid caring roles, families, friends and neighbours and the role of the individual in improving health and care outcomes

2. From evidence to policy and from policy to practice

Gathering valuable knowledge and evidence to support knowledge translation

Creating valuable knowledge and evidence including embedding evaluation process at a local level that can support transferable knowledge and lessons for other initiatives
What does good look like? Are better outcomes driven by hands-on local drivers or does national policy and system level enablers drive improvements?
How do we make best use of evidence and lessons from pilots and early innovators to support decision-making for new programmes
What are the old and new indicators for integrate care? How can we look to both long-term and shorter-term metrics to support decision making and how integrated care is being financed in practice?
What have we learnt from the shift in the past 10 years towards supporting the delivery of integrated care and how can that knowledge support the system change required to manage demographic changes?
How can we move from reactive to proactive care planning?
How can health and care partners support knowledge translation and evidence sharing to the wider public sector to support better outcomes across the whole community?

Change management

What are the implications of the roll-out of Integrated Care Systems in Northern Ireland for organisations and individuals across the region?
What can be done to support leaders and champions that support change and engagement at different levels? How can we avoid leadership burnout from multiple re-structures? How can we demonstrate and celebrate improvements?
How can national, regional and local governments consider system level change to support scale up and implementation at a local level?
How can we support leaders to maintain focus during periods of national structural change or government turbulence or uncertainty?
How can we better understand the implications of financial squeezes and the unintended consequences? How can we understand and measure interventions at both primary and secondary care levels that support better financial outcomes across the system?

3. Supporting the health and care workforce

Building workforce capacity and capability

How can we skill the workforce to empower patients and shift the management of care from staff to patients where appropriate?
How can we build the research capacity and capability within different roles? How do we provide opportunities to build our research query, thinking about both clinical and non-clinical research careers development and how we can accommodate and support those developments across organisations and systems?
What have we learnt about the shifting boundaries and redesigning of roles and the potential for new and more innovative roles to develop in the future?

Supporting the workforce to deliver integrated care

What are the policy and process and infrastructural changes that support workforce skills that will enable adoption of integrated models, that have patients and quality at its heart, but still enable flows of data for efficient management?
What enablers will support the health and care workforce to work alongside and with community health workers?
How do we manage the introduction of new roles and what that means for other members of the workforce, thinking about managing the balance between clinical and social care, keeping both health and social outcomes, including independent living, in view?

Interdisciplinary and multi-agency working

What can we learn from teams at the local level and how they are working and how they integrate care?
How can we use funding and commissioning contracts to make multidisciplinary work and interagency work a matter of course?
What support can be provided to develop the talents, capacity, and capability of team leaders?
What are the key principles of good interdisciplinary working and how can learning be used in other areas, particularly around developing new models of integrated care?
What more can we do to enable individual team members to work at the top of their license to support and to build teams that are most functional and effective?

4. Delivering integrated care in the community

Engaging communities

What lessons can be learnt from the adoption and spread of social movements for change from within the community?
How can we meaningfully incorporate local knowledge and lived experience?
How can we promote whole family support and empower people to advocate for their own health needs? How do we ensure support across the lifespan?
How can we support system leaders to shift the power structures to people and communities?
What can we learn from consumer and other sectors about engaging people and sustaining engagement over time?

Improving population health outcomes

How can we support both mental and physical health needs of the population to improve health and wellbeing, without valuing one over other, and which might reduce pressure on emergency services?
What will support greater collaboration between community pharmacists, allied health professionals and other community-based professionals and partners with primary and secondary care and social care?
What can be done to promote the role of community health workers?
How can we move beyond public health advice to really supporting healthy communities, thinking about social prescribing, mental health and wellbeing and self-management, particularly for those who are least able to support themselves?
How can we improve experience of health and care services for families, particularly thinking about youth mental health needs?
How can we support continued care closer to home, particularly for frail older people and their families and carers?

Improving health and care access particularly for priority, remote and rural populations

How do we design services to deliver better care for underserved and ‘hard to serve’ populations thinking about priority populations, as well as remote and rural populations?
How can we be more inclusive of marginalized communities such as the homeless and migrant and refugee communities who struggle to access any kind of health and care service?

Supporting self-management and patient and family empowerment

What is the role of the individual and the informal circle of care in improving long-term health and care outcomes?
What can we do to develop opportunities for supported self-care, placing less emphasis on resilience and independence if interdependence is more feasible?
What policies and processes or infrastructure changes are required to support a shift in power from the service to the patient?

5. The role of general practice and primary care in integration

Primary care is traditionally focused on general practice, but requires a shift to include other community-based partners, including community pharmacies, allied health professionals, education, social care and others
How can we support the development of networks in primary care to help with system co-design?

What is the role of general practice and primary care in supporting care in different settings? (thinking about homecare, residential care, migrant and refugee care, and care for homeless populations)

What can we do to support leaders across all professions in primary care, and encourage and support that from early career undergraduate and early postgraduate working across all clinical specialties?
Breaking down the silos between primary and secondary care and focusing on the interface between the two is an important area for learning

6. Meaningful use of digital solutions and shared data for information and care management

Data and Information Management

How do we make the integrated care system more person-centred by co-managing the data with individuals and having shared information systems?
How will shared information systems activate patients and the informal circle of care to support better outcomes?
How can we use the data we have to create knowledge and information that supports better decision-making?
What tools and approaches can support measuring what matters to people and communities?
How can we use data to support better payment models and systems?

Digital Solutions

How can digital health solutions support better population health outcomes?
How can virtual care and telehealth and telecare solutions support better outcomes for remote and rural communities?
What can we learn from other industries about digital solutions that support self-management and self-monitoring?
How can digital solutions support rehabilitation and care management?