ICARE4EU: Innovating care for people with multiple chronic conditions in Europe

The ICARE4EU project, financially supported by the Health Programme 2008-2013 of the European Commission, wants to improve the care for people suffering from multiple chronic conditions in Europe: Sharing knowledge and experiences to develop new policies and practices. 

The symposium will take place in Brussels, 22 March 2016 and the participation is free of charge, only is necessary to send an email to be registered.  

For questions or further information, please contact: 

Verena Struckmann – verena.struckmann@tu-berlin.de
Or visit their website www.icare4eu.org

Building capacity in primary care rehabilitation clinical practice guidelines: a South African initiative

The large number of South Africans with disability who cannot access good quality rehabilitation presents a public health and human rights challenge. A cost-effective, efficient approach is required to address this. Implementation of high-quality, contextually relevant clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) could be a solution; however, this requires significant investment in innovative capacity-building.

Innovation of the governance of integrated care

Interest in integrated care is growing. This is reflected in the rising numbers of scientific publications, IJIC’s increased impact factor and the increasing number of participants at IFIC’s international conferences. It is stimulating to see that organizations like the World Health Organisation are developing conceptual frameworks that embrace integrated care. At the same time we know that integrated care does not become reality automatically; it takes a long timeframe. That can be conflicting with ambitions like ‘implementing good practices as fast as possible’ and with the pressure to deliver results in politically set tight time frames.

Tomorrow’s World: Is Digital Health the Disruptive Innovation that will Drive the Adoption of Integrated Care Systems?

The idea of this study is that disruptive digital innovations can play a significant role in curbing the long-term rise in the costs of health and care, empower and engage service users, and enable better care outcomes and experiences.
In many ways, the strategy has similar objectives to the integrated care movement in the need to design and implement new ways of care delivery. Indeed, the role of information, communication and technology is commonly regarded as one of the essential ingredients in enabling the success of integrated care. It has the most uncommon dual property in this regard. It is simultaneously the grease that allows integrated care systems to operate as smoothly as they can through good communication of information between care professionals and services users, but it is also the glue that binds care systems together.

Health in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: from framework to action, transforming challenges into opportunities

The clock is ticking and just a little more than 10 years remain to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Enhanced political and public awareness, inter- and transdisciplinary engagement, new partnerships, and multisectoral collaborations are required to foster knowledge-and-action societies in order to tackle the complex issues that are inherent to sustainable development. A one-day symposium held in Basel, Switzerland, in November 2018 offered a venue for open exchange on how to stimulate dialogue for co-creating innovative ideas and scalable action to address some of the most pressing challenges of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

NACIC2021 – 1st North American Conference on Integrated Care, Toronto, Canada

Unknown makes unloved—A case study on improving integrated health and social care in the Netherlands using a participatory approach

Many initiatives integrating health and social care have been implemented in order to provide adequate care and support to older people living at home. Further development of existing initiatives requires iterative processes of developing, implementing and evaluating improvements to current practice. This case study provides insight into the process of improving an existing integrated care initiative in the Netherlands. Using a participatory approach, researchers and local stakeholders collaborated to develop and implement activities to further improve collaboration between health and social care professionals. Improvement activities included interprofessional meetings focussing on reflection and mutual learning and workplace visits. Researchers evaluated the improvement process, using data triangulation of multiple qualitative and quantitative data sources. 

Suitable Scales; Rethinking Scale for Innovative Integrated Care Governance

For organising person centered care, an important issue is how to deal with scale. This addresses what to organise on what level (in the neighbourhood, local, in the region, or national). With the increasing complexity of organising integrated care in networks, scale issues are an ingredient of integrated care governance. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that treat scale as an object of study in itself. Scale is an outcome of the interplay between many different interests, values and perceptions of people involved in the broader social and political processes. Five factors for suitable scales are discussed, emphasising the relevance for integrated care governance. These factors show, that the classical micro-meso-macro thinking oversimplify reality and more knowledge about suitable scales is required.

Supporting integrated care in practice: Perceptions of a national support programme for the development of New Care Models in England

This paper investigates the perceptions of key informants on a national support programme for the development of New Care Models in England (2015/16 to 2017/18). It focuses on the perceived facilitators and barriers affecting the development and implementation of the New Care Models programme and offers some insight into the role of national level support in enabling local integration initiatives. Besides the paper demonstrates that analysis of facilitators and challenges with respect to the national support of implementation of integrated care initiatives should move beyond the focus on separate influencing factors and address the tensions that the complex interplay among these factors create.