Building relationships for Integrated Care via Integrated Care Communities of Practice

Building integrated care

Integrated Care: A Pill for All Ills?

There is an increasing policy emphasis on the integration of care, both within the healthcare sector and also between the health and social care sectors, with the simple aim of ensuring that individuals get the right care, in the right place, at the right time. However, implementing this simple aim is rather more complex. In this editorial, we seek to make sense of this complexity and ask: what...

The Building Blocks of Integrated Care

This special issue grows out of a collaborative project between IFIC and Edge Hill University (UK) that led to six webinars delivered by international experts on integrated care. 1 The papers are reflection pieces by those who delivered the webinars providing a unique summary of accumulated expertise in some of the most important themes in the integrated care field. This special issue also offe...

Building a Tower of Babel in health care? Theory & practice of community-based integrated care

Many hold that performance in health care can be improved. However, the state-of-the-art on health care improvement indicates that improvement activities and strategies have too limited success so far. From a ‘systems perspective’, this limited success stems from a lack of coherence among the various strategies and instruments employed. For example, practice guidelines, client councils, regulat...

Communities as co-producers in integrated care

Integrated care has become too much a professionals' concept, in research and theory development, as well as in practice, especially in high-income countries. The current debate on integrated care is dominated by norms and values of professionals, while most of the care is provided by non-professionals. The paradigms of integrated care for people with complex needs need to be reconsidered. It i...