Managing quality in community health care services

Community health care services provide vital care out of hospital for millions of people. From children’s services to care for older people and end-of-life support, the community sector plays a key part in meeting the challenges facing our health and care system. This report presents findings from a small-scale study into how quality is managed in community services. It explores how community care providers define and measure quality and recommends important next steps to support better measurement and management of quality.

Multi-specialty community providers and primary and acute care systems

The primary and acute care systems (PACS) model and multi-specialty community provider (MCP) model are particularly focussed on building partnerships between GP, hospital, community and mental health care organisations to build a health care system to meet their local population’s health needs.

This Conference will take a detailed look at each of these models of care. One year on from the launch of the PACS and MCP vanguard sites, it will provide an opportunity to hear from the sites and others on how are they working in practice with lessons for areas of the United Kingdom that are interested in implementing similar models for their local populations. 

Programme:

Multi-specialty community providers and primary and acute care systems

Speakers

Registration

Global Conference on Integrated Care 2018

The Global Conference on Integrated Care (GCIC) 2018 is an international conference that will bring together clinicians, health and social care professionals and practitioners, and policymakers from around the world to share knowledge, experiences, ideas and innovations in integrated care delivery. The conference will be used as a platform to look beyond the immediate horizon, future-proof healthcare delivery, and strengthen relationships between policymakers and public users to enable successful care integration.A world-class programme of keynote lectures, plenary sessions and symposia has been designed to facilitate impactful knowledge exchange and foster fruitful dialogues with internationally renowned experts.

It will cover the three key themes of:
- Care Integration in Practice
- Enabling Care Integration
- Transcending Boundaries in Integrated Care

Who should attend?
- Clinicians, health and social care practitioners
- Healthcare administrators
- Academics and researchers

For more information and registration, please visit: https://gcic2018.sg/ 

Stakeholder Perceptions and Context of the Implementation of Performance-Based Financing in District Hospitals in Mali

To improve the performance of the healthcare system, Mali’s government implemented a pilot project of performance-based financing (PBF) in the field of reproductive health. It was established in the Koulikoro region. This research analyses the process of implementing PBF at district hospital (DH) level, something which has rarely been done in Africa.

Integrated care for older people (ICOPE): guidance for person-centred assessment and pathways in primary care

The ICOPE guidance for person-centred assessment and pathways in primary care (ICOPE Handbook) helps community health and care workers put the recommendations outlined in the ICOPE Guidelines into practice. The Handbook assists with setting person-centred goals, screening for loss in a range of domains of intrinsic capacity and assessing health and social care needs to develop a personalised care plan. The care plan may include multiple interventions to manage declines in intrinsic capacity, provide social care and support, support self-management and support caregivers. The domains of intrinsic capacity include cognitive decline, limited mobility, malnutrition, visual impairment, hearing loss and depressive symptoms.

Goal planning in person-centred care supports older adults receiving case management to attain their health-related goals

Care for older adults should preferably be provided in a person-centred way that includes goal planning. The aim of the present cohort study is to gain an insight into the results of goal planning, in a person-centred care setting for community-living older adults.

End-line Assessment of Integrated People-Centered Health Services in Nelson Mandela Metro Municipality, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

Since 2013, the USAID Applying Science to Strengthen and Improve Systems (ASSIST) Project has been working closely with the South African Department of Health (DOH) and its partners in five provinces to accelerate the reduction of morbidity and mortality through improving access, utilization, and satisfaction with essential HIV services. Drawing on its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) Service Delivery and Safety Department to promote people-centered care as an essential pillar of health service quality, ASSIST secured support from the USAID Office of Health Systems to pilot WHO’s global framework on integrated people-centered health services (IPCHS) in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan District in Eastern Cape Province.

The pilot project consisted of a baseline assessment to harvest patient, provider, and decision maker perceptions and satisfaction regarding integration and patient centeredness in HIV services at onset of the project; training in quality improvement and IPCHS concepts and methodology; facility-based identification ...

National Forum on Integrated Care in Ireland (NFICI) 2020

In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions in place, we regretfully inform you that the National Forum on Integrated Care in Ireland has been cancelled.

IFIC Ireland in association with the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC), the UCD Centre for Integrated Care and Improvement Studies (UCD CICIS) and the Health Service Executive (HSE) Ireland presents “Transforming Health and Social Care in Ireland: Delivering Lifelong People-centred Care” on Wednesday, 6 May 2020 in O’Reilly Hall University College Dublin. The forum is attended by up to 300 delegates from across Ireland and Northern Ireland and includes Health and Social Care Services Mangers, Clinicians and System leads, Academics leading in the field of integrated care, and a wide range of not for profit patient representative organisations and private sector providers of care services.

Care providers, access to care, and the Long-term Care Nursing Insurance in China: An agent-based simulation

China piloted a publicly funded Long-term Care Nursing Insurance (LTCNI) with an aim to improve access to long-term care (LTC) for older people in China in 2012. Existing studies showed that the scheme has been successful in meeting some goals, but little is known on how the availability, price and quality of the local care providers affect access to care. This article founded considerable discrepancies in terms of access to services among the LTCNI beneficiaries. The poor are more likely to choose nursing home care with low costs albeit these services may be of poor quality. The demand for home-based services is high, but these services are not distributed according to population needs and are not available in some districts with high concentration of older people. 

Exploring improvement plans of fourteen European integrated care sites for older people with complex needs

Integrated care programmes are increasingly being put in place to provide care to older people living at home. However, knowledge about further improving integrated care is limited. In fourteen integrated care sites in Europe, plans to improve existing ways of working were designed, implemented and evaluated to enlarge the understanding of what works and with what outcomes when improving integrated care. This paper provides insight into the existing ways that the sites were working with respect to integrated care, their perceived difficulties and their plans for working towards improvement. 

Horizontal and Vertical Integration of Health Care Providers: A Framework for Understanding Various Provider Organizational Structures

Current U.S. policy and payment initiatives aim to encourage health care provider accountability for population health and higher value care, resulting in efforts to integrate providers along the continuum. Providers work together through diverse organizational structures, yet evidence is limited regarding how to best organize the delivery system to achieve higher value care. 

Driving and accelerating a 'one system' response: why COVID-19 has shone a spotlight on Integrated Care

High performing health and social care systems provide exceptional care, quality and experiences for patients, caregivers and providers. Pivotal to this, is how we work across health and social care as one team. The need for integrated care is a global priority and is poised to address fragmentation and accelerate the improvements that are needed. During a global pandemic, the need to work as an integrated system is even more pressing and gives us an opportunity to pause, reflect and respond.

In situations where systems are subjected to unprecedented pressure, organizations and sectors may respond from the lens of what can their individual organization or sector do, rather than responding as a cohesive and interconnected system.

Organizations that have embraced collaborative models of response and care and were already working to advance integration pre-pandemic appear to be more effective in responding as one connected team and community.

This webinar will ...

The acceptability of integrated healthcare services for HIV and non-communicable diseases: experiences from patients and healthcare workers in Tanzania

In sub-Saharan Africa, the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) has risen sharply amidst a high burden of communicable diseases. An integrated approach to HIV and NCD care offers the potential of strengthening disease control programmes. We used qualitative methods to explore patients’ and care-providers’ experiences and perspectives on the acceptability of integrated care for HIV-infection, diabetes mellitus (DM), and hypertension (HT) in Tanzania.