Over the course of the week from the 3rd to the 7th of July, the sun shone steadily on Wolfson College, Oxford. People were merrily floating on punts down the Cherwell river, flowers were in bloom and students were relaxing on picnic blankets under the shade of weeping willows. Fellow health and social care professionals, …
In May 2017 IFIC was invited to become a content partner on a new joint initiative hosted by the Network of European Foundations entitled the Transnational Forum of Integrated Community Care.
On March 31th, 2017, delegates from the Franciscus Gasthuis & Vlietland (FG&V) regional hospital from the Netherlands visited North-West London, as part of an international learning exchange. The purpose of the trip was to bring together key physicians from the FG&V region to learn about essential approaches to the design, implementation and funding of integrated care.
This year’s ICIC17 in Dublin was a fantastic experience. The growth in delegate numbers to some 1200 attendees, and the breadth in representation from 54 different countries, demonstrates the international appeal in integrated care as a means to achieving more sustainable health and care systems.
Once again, attending the ICIC conference has been a rich and truly gratifying experience. The plenaries, breakout sessions and workshops, as well as the endless opportunities to debate and learn have configured a vibrant event. I very much hope that all delegates have enjoyed it as much as I did.
Being at the ICIC17 was a real pleasure. The high number of delegates and the high number of contributions from numerous countries reflects that integrated care matters. As in previous editions, attendees still want to explore what integrated care really is about, how it can work in practice, what experiences there are and, what we can learn from each other. Lessons are being shared and also being recognized by others when discussed
#ICIC17 is over, and what a great conference it was! Overall it was very heart-warming to see and experience the strong patient and carer voice over the three days, which was felt at a number of levels. On behalf of the 105 patient organisation members in IPPOSI, I wish to thank the IFIC team, and especially Dr Aine Carroll, the HSE’s National Director of Clinical Strategy & Programmes, for putting together such a wonderful event. Some of our IPPOSI-related highlights included
Congratulations to Nick and his entire team for another successful ICIC! It is an accomplishment in itself to be in the 17th year of the event, but having the most registrants to date speaks volumes to the impact and increasing relevance of integrated care.
We have just published a paper on an integrated community service development we have been observing for more than a decade (1,2). The collaborative relationship started with the recognition that people with serious and persistent mental illnesses did not access general practitioners for physical health care despite being amongst the most vulnerable people in the community.
It is now more than a month since the 4th World Congress on Integrated Care (WCIC4) was held in Wellington. Over 600 delegates from the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia and of course the host nation, New Zealand attended the 3 day event taking advantage of the high quality of plenary discussions, parallel sessions and workshops.
Globally, 2016 is likely to become regarded as the year that the integrated care movement came of age. The ratification by the 69th World Health Assembly in May of the World Health Organisation’s Framework for Integrated People-Centred Health Services set a global challenge for all care systems to make a fundamental shift in care delivery that puts people and communities at the centre of more co-ordinated health and care systems.
Parallel to an ageing society is the increase in prevalence of multi-morbidity. Persons with multi-morbidity often deal with multiple care providers in both the health- and social care sectors, and are likely to benefit from person-centred integrated, and well-coordinated, care. Different integrated care programmes for multi-morbidity can be identified, however, further developments in the field are needed. The Horizon2020 EU project ‘SELFIE’ (Sustainable intEgrated care modeLs for multi-morbidity: delivery, FinancIng and pErformance) aims to address these needs. In the coming years, we would like to update readers of the IFIC-blog on the progress we make in SELFIE.
In his first blog as part of his Fellowship with the Foundation, Dr Harry Pope discusses how the Australian government is looking for more “cost neutral” ways of delivering medical services within a primary care setting.
The 1960s saw the emergence of cooperation in healthcare; a development that started with the GP. Teams were established. A second wave of cooperation emerged in the 1980s. This second wave concerned care for people with chronic conditions. Primary care and secondary care started to cooperate: shared care was born. The first ten conferences of the International Foundation of Integrated Care (1999-2009) focused on cooperation in primary care, elderly care and chronic care and continued to do so in the years after. However, integrated care also expanded to mental healthcare, palliative care, emergency care and birth care. Currently, global efforts are made to expand integrated care to a great number of new patient groups and to study aspects of it.
This blog is about intentionality. We intend to improve integrated care for local people – and improvement can be anywhere on the spectrum of small local change, to radical new models of care to transform population health outcomes – and we intend to invest time, energy and resources in doing this.
Almost 1200 people, from around the globe and with different perspectives, gathered together in Barcelona to participate at the 16th International Conference on Integrated Care organized by IFIC in cooperation with the Catalonian government.As in the past, many common challenges where discussed. This year however something new clearly emerged at the event: a stronger feeling of “action”.
On the 23-25 May 2016, our 16th International Conference on Integrated Care in Barcelona attracted an unprecedented number of delegates – over 500 oral and poster presentations, some 1200 registered participants from nearly 50 countries, and a further 600 persons per day watching events via the live stream. The conference even trended on Twitter with #icic16 reaching a ‘tweet reach’ of some 1.25 million – a sizeable impression indeed.
Tiohundra AB in Norrtälje, Sweden, was chosen as one of the sites for case studies within the area of mental health as part of the Project Integrate. On the 22nd of March 2016 Dr Nick Goodwin and Dr Viktoria Stein from the IFIC, visited Norrtälje in order to give some feed-back on the framework developed within the Project Integrate so far, as well as getting updated on the development of the integration of services in Norrtälje.
In the 1960s, John Fry, a British GP, introduced multidisciplinary cooperation for general practitioners, district nurses and social workers. In the Netherlands, his Dutch colleague, Frans Huygen, followed his example. The home team was born. Since then, this form of cooperation has become business as usual in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
In the United States, in 1967, Pediatrics first described the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model for use with special needs children who had complex medical, developmental and psychosocial needs, 1 then expanded this model to care for all children in 19922, as pediatricians became more focused on optimal health and development.
As integrated care is moving out of its niche and becoming increasingly popular as a guiding principle for the organization of services around people’s needs. It has been acknowledged that it is one thing to design integrated institutions and processes, but quite another to get people to actually use and apply them.
One of the key outcomes of Project INTEGRATE will be to provide managers and policy-makers with guidance on how to implement and sustain integrated care initiatives in practice.
Integrated care is an international movement for change. With these words Dr Nick Goodwin, IFIC CEO, concluded WCIC3, the 3rd World Congress on Integrated Care which took place on 20 and 21 November in Mexico City. What can we learn from these worldwide developments as discussed at WCIC3?
It is the year 2020. Breast cancer patient Christine is in hospital. She has metastasis. Christine has a talk with nursing specialist Florence. They discuss Christine’s future. Should she have more, less or other treatment? Or no treatment at all anymore and only palliative care?
Fiona Lyne, Director of Communications provides an overview of recent activities including highlights from ICIC15, plans for our next World Congresses and International Conferences as well as exciting developments in European integrated care projects and plans for the member’s network online platform.
Integrated care is regarded as the best response to new challenges in health care delivery, which has risen due to aging population, increased prevalence of chronic diseases and multi-morbidity for the gain in quality of care and efficiency.
The Spanish Observatory on Integrated Care (Observatorio de Modelos Integrados en Salud, OMIS) has just published the first annual report on integrated care experiences in Spain. The report collates and classifies the practices registered at the Observatory website over 2014, highlighting their key innovative and transformative elements in providing integrated social and health care to …
I am thrilled to be supporting IBM Smarter Care at the 15th International Conference for Integrated Care (ICIC15) for what is going to be another stimulating event.
Three hundred and ninety three municipalities, 120 GP cooperatives, 31 financial agencies for long term care (FALTC’s), nine experimental gardens…
We explored current approaches to service integration and the outcomes that people with long-term neurological conditions (LTNCs) want to achieve.
The best abstract award at WCIC2 which took place in Sydney, Australia was presented to: Robert Peter Leitner, Bruce Chenoweth, Lif O’Connor, Jurgen Wille, Anne Funke, all from South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, Australia, and Rhoshel Lenroot, from University of New South Wales, Australia Title: Metro-Regional Intellectual Disability Network (MRID.net) A Statewide Collaborative Multidisciplinary Care Model The abstract stated that …
IFIC poster prizes acknowledge the valuable contributions the authors and researchers submitting these abstracts make to enhance integrated care science and practice. For having the courage to turn negative study results into a positive learning experience and strengthening health economic research in integrated care, the best poster award of the Second World Congress of Integrated …
Project INTEGRATE will describe how integrated care can be of added value to patients with chronic conditions while taking into account case, care, quality assessment and health system complexity. Today, there is no is universally accepted definition of integrated care. Integrated care is a concept that is polymorphous in its kind and that has been …
14th ICIC 2014 “Taking Integrated Care Forward: People, Policy and Practice” held in Brussels in April 2014, was a great opportunity for Project INTEGRATE to present and share, with international experts on integrate care, case study findings on four integrated care experiences in different systems and organisations: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in Hospital Clinic- Spain, …
Chaired by Hernan Montenegro, Health Systems Advisor, WHO, Geneva Switzerland This session, which took place at WCIC2 in Sydney, offered participants a chance to reorient themselves on a core issue in integrated care: collaboration. Many people working to implement integrated care can easily get caught up in the technical issues of developing or changing an existing …
20 poster presentations covering horizontal and vertical integration of care, with global and European applicability. Some were people centred and bottom-up, with others focusing on systems and services and describing top-down approaches to integrated care. Many were work in progress so we will look forward to further presentations and results at future conferences. The panel, …
I attended the session on “Organisational models and care pathways” run by the colleagues from EIP AHA B3 Action Group. The first thing I found amazing and interesting to learn was that Scotland has now launched legislation on social and healthcare integration. It is now a Public Bodies (Joint Working Scotland) Act 2014, (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2014/9/pdfs/asp_20140009_en.pdf) and …
A great start to International Conference on Integrated Care 2014 On the first afternoon of this year’s International Conference on Integrated Care 2014 there was a session focussed on the service user or patient in the context of integrated care. The three presenters took the audience on a journey by first seeking to define person centred care …
Session P5-B – Empowering people through integrated care – patient empowerment The session offered delegates an opportunity to take part to an open discussion on patient empowerment and share their views and knowledge on the matter with the high level panellist representing stakeholders of all categories: Institutions, patient organizations, academia, health professionals and EC experts. …
Integrated care in practice: collaborative practice in integrated care Chaired by Hernan Montenegro, Health Systems Advisor, WHO, Geneva Switzerland This session offered participants a chance to reorient themselves on a core issue in integrated care: collaboration. Many people working to implement integrated care can easily get caught up in the technical issues of developing or …