“Progress with integrated care across the globe: national overviews and shared learning for the future”

In 2011, IJIC produced a special collection of articles which reviewed integrated care developments in a number of countries. Ten years on, there has been collective progress across the world in recognising the importance of integrated care and integrated care is becoming a reality for more people. Each country has taken its own approach which provides opportunity for learning about what has been successful and what could have been implemented better. There is also a need for those who are less familiar with policy and practice of integrated care to have access to an informed and critical overview of developments.

Topic and format

IJIC is therefore seeking policy papers for submission for a 20^thAnniversary Special Collection. These should focus on “whole system developments” in the last decade within a country or region, and cover the following themes:

• The key policy developments over the past ten years that have sought to advance integrated care;
• Key programmes or approaches that have been developed to implement integrated care in practice;
• Review of evidence of any impact that integrated care has made using the Quadruple Aim outcomes as a guide, i.e. care experiences, care outcomes, value for money (costs of care), and workforce;
• A retrospective assessment of the key barriers and facilitators to the adoption of integrated care in policy and practice; and
• The key challenges and opportunities for the integrated care movement going forward.

These papers should look at integrated care in the round – i.e. acute/primary, health/social care and mental/physical health. The focus should not be on one specific disease management programme or population within a local context, but give a good understanding of the whole system scale (-up) of integrated care efforts.

Submission process

As a first step, we ask for submissions of an Expression of Interest with an Abstract outlining the policy paper and the themes above to IJIC’s managing editor, Susan Royer. The editors-in-chief will review all submissions and select those, which will be invited to submit a full policy paper. The submission process will then follow the regular IJIC online process. The papers will be peer reviewed by the editorial board of IJIC. Publication of the Special Collection is planned to coincide with ICIC21.

Dates and fees

• Submission of Expression of Interest until 17 July 2020 to susanroyer@integratedcarefoundation.org
• Invitation to submit full policy paper by 31 July 2020
• Submission of full policy paper by 31 October 2020
• If accepted, authors will be required to pay a reduced fee of GBP 625 plus VAT, to cover publication costs

We are looking forward to a wide variety and truly global collection of papers and experiences to push integrated care learning to the next level!