WHO’s global survey on assistive technologies

WHO has launched a global survey to gather views on the most necessary and useful assistive technologies such as hearing aids and wheel chairs. The survey will feed into the first ever WHO mandated list of essential assistive technologies, similar to the WHO Essential Medicines List. These practical tools – some low, some higher technologies – are becoming increasingly necessary to the many people in high- and middle-income countries who are living longer due to better healthcare. Similar devices are used by people with disabilities, allowing them to live more autonomously and participate in their communities. This list will represent a tool for governments to plan and focus efforts to help populations acquire the 50 priority products, thereby improving the everyday lives of the elderly and people with disabilities. The survey may be taken via a link on this WHO page.

The Users’ Perspective: What Integrated Care should look like

At the International Conference on Integrated Care 2014, Robert Johnstone, Trustee of the International Alliance of Patients’ Organisations, gave a talk titled "The Users’ Perspective: What Integrated Care should look like". Having had chronic rheumatoid arthritis since the age of three, he shared his personal story of moving away from being “a very passive recipient of care” to becoming "a self-managing patient”. When he was about fourteen years old, he told his rheumatologist that eating acidic food seemed to make his pain worse. The rheumatologist replied that this was not possible, so because he trusted his doctor he kept eating acidic food and feeling pain. Later in his life, he progressively learned to listen to his own body and to work out what was good and what was bad for him. He gradually reduced his use of medications until he stopped taking them completely while using complementary therapies and focusing ...

The Users’ Perspective: What Integrated Care should look like

At the International Conference on Integrated Care 2014, Robert Johnstone, Trustee of the International Alliance of Patients’ Organisations, gave a talk titled "The Users’ Perspective: What Integrated Care should look like". Having had chronic rheumatoid arthritis since the age of three, he shared his personal story of moving away from being “a very passive recipient of care” to becoming "a self-managing patient”. When he was about fourteen years old, he told his rheumatologist that eating acidic food seemed to make his pain worse. The rheumatologist replied that this was not possible, so because he trusted his doctor he kept eating acidic food and feeling pain. Later in his life, he progressively learned to listen to his own body and to work out what was good and what was bad for him. He gradually reduced his use of medications until he stopped taking them completely while using complementary therapies and focusing ...

The patient-as-partner approach in health care: a conceptual framework for a necessary transition.

A new model to enforce the partnership between patients and healthcare professionals has been developed at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Medicine. Their patient-as-partner approach is rooted in patient-centered perspectives that have inspired previous initiatives like shared decision making, therapeutic education, expert patient and self-management. The main contribution of “Montreal model” is to consider the patient as a caregiver of himself and, as such, a genuine member of the treatment team, endowed with competencies and limitations just like any other member of the team.
This article describes the theoretical basis and summarize the main achievements of this innovative approach, established since 2010. Authors examine the issues of patient partnerships on medical practice and medical education cultures. Two key challenges are identified: 1) Integrate patients in existing professional education structures, instead of separate spaces as patient’s universities and 2) Develop a formal recruitment process for those patients, including ...

Supporting self-management: A guide to enabling behaviour change for health and wellbeing using person- and community-centred approaches

This guide outlines how the science of behaviour can help people to self-manage their health and wellbeing.

Key findings

• The guide uses the EAST framework to organise ideas and examples. The core message of EAST is that if you want to encourage a behaviour, you should make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.
• The guide features a number of low-tech, pragmatic and manageable activities which can increase the spread of person- and community-centred health and wellbeing programmes.

This action-focused guide is part of the NHS England-funded Realising the Value programme, which seeks to develop person- and community-centred approaches for health and wellbeing. The programme is doing so by building the evidence base and developing tools, resources and networks to support the spread and impact of these approaches.

This guide offers two things: a framework for understanding and changing behaviour, and real-world examples of how these changes happen in practice

It ...

From vision to action. Making patient-centred care a reality

The NHS have worked with The King´s Fund to translate their themes into outcomes for patients and set out the most important priorities for action to achieve these outcomes. Under each of their five themes: 

- Co-ordinated care

- Patients engaged decisions about their care

- Supported self-management

- Prevention, early diagnosis and intervention

- Emotional, psychological and practical support

they have described the outcomes that they most want to achieve for patients. In order to achieve these outcomes, they hace then selected the service improvements that, if met, will have a major impact on the quality and cost-effectiveness of care. 

A Digital NHS? An introduction to the digital agenda and plans for implementation

Integrated care: better and cheaper

Integrated care improves health, increases quality of care and lowers costs. These three goals, this Triple Aim in other words, are achieved in many examples from all over the world: from Alaska to New Zealand, from Western Europe to South Africa. However, disseminating all these good examples is easier said than done, as nationwide implementation means the simultaneous realisation of the following six components of integrated care:

1. Multidisciplinary care pathways and decision trees

2. Patient self-management and shared decision-making by patients and professionals

3. Guaranteeing professional and patient- perceived quality

4. Population-based funding and shared savings

5. An Electronic Health Record and e-health

6. Servant leadership and a strategy for change management.

These are the conclusions Guus Schrijvers draws in his book Integrated Care: better and cheaper. His conclusions are based on more than 500 studies from the 1960s until mid-2016. In addition, he also draws on his own ...

Integrating Community Health Workers Into Medical Homes

Though evidence supports the value of community health workers (CHWs) in chronic disease self-management support, and authorities have called for expanding their roles within patient-centered medical homes (PCMSs), few PCMHs in Minnesota have incorporated these health workers into their care teams. They undertook a qualitative study to (1) identify facilitators and barriers to utilizing a CHW model among PCMHs in Minnesota, and (2) define roles played by this workforce within the PCMH team

Aspects of Multicomponent Integrated Care Promote Sustained Improvement in Surrogate Clinical Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

The implementation of the Chronic Care Model (CCM) improves health care quality. This study examined the sustained effectiveness of multicomponent integrated care in type 2 diabetes. Despite the small effect size of multicomponent integrated care team-based care with better information flow may improve patient-provider communication and self-management in patients who are young, with suboptimal control, and in low-resource settings. 

Management of multimorbidity using a patient-centred care model: a pragmatic cluster-randomised trial of the 3D approach

The management of people with multiple chronic conditions challenges health-care systems designed around single conditions. There is international consensus that care for multimorbidity should be patient-centred, focus on quality of life, and promote self-management towards agreed goals. However, there is little evidence about the effectiveness of this approach. The article´s hypothesis was that the patient-centred, so-called 3D approach (based on dimensions of health, depression, and drugs) for patients with multimorbidity would improve their health-related quality of life, which is the ultimate aim of the 3D intervention.

ICIC20 – 20th International Conference on Integrated Care (Virtual Edition)

The 20th International Conference on Integrated Care (ICIC20) will take place virtually, the dates 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th September 2020.

The conference will build on themes from previous years and in particular would like to include in this year's programme papers that are focusing on the following areas:

• Meeting the challenges of integrated care in early development, childhood and transitional care in adolescents
• Integrated community care approaches for better management of diseases with a stigmatizing effect, including for example mental health and addiction issues 
• Better managing the care of vulnerable populations including for example war veterans, and preventing isolation and loneliness 
• Integrating survivorship, caring for carers, palliative and end-of-life care 
• Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital tools in the people-centred integrated care

20th International Conference on Integrated Care (ICIC20)

In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions in place, we regretfully inform you that the 20th International Conference on Integrated Care in Croatia, scheduled for 27 – 29 April 2020, cannot go ahead as planned. The conference has NOT been cancelled and will take place later this year when we understand when attendees will be in a better position to participate. IFIC are currently working with our hosts on an alternative solution and will be making an announcement in the comings weeks. We are mindful of those working at the frontline and in the management of health and care systems right now and they must be our first priority. We are committed to delivering the conference and we appreciate your patience whilst we work on finalising details. (International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC)).

The 20th International Conference on Integrated Care (ICIC20) will take place in Sibenik, Croatia ...

Self-management support for chronic disease in primary care: frequency of patient self-management problems and patient reported priorities, and alignment with ultimate behavior goal selection

To enable delivery of high quality patient-centered care, as well as to allow primary care health systems to allocate appropriate resources that align with patients’ identified self-management problems (SM-Problems) and priorities (SM-Priorities), a practical, systematic method for assessing self-management needs and priorities is needed. In this current report, are present the patient reported data generated from Connection to Health (CTH), to identify the frequency of patients’ reported SM-Problems and SM-Priorities; and examine the degree of alignment between patient SM-Priorities and the ultimate Patient-Healthcare team member selected Behavioral Goal.

Maturity Model in Practice – SCIROCCO self-assessment tool

The SCIROCCO self-assessment tool is an online self- assessment tool with an objective to assess a region’s readiness for integrated care. It builds on the conceptual Maturity Model for Integrated Care developed by the B3 Action Group on Integrated Care of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing.

• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of their regional context for integrated care  and inform national, regional and local policy-makers about potential areas of  improvement;
• Adopt and transfer integrated care good practices by identifying their maturity  requirements and requirements for the potential transferability and scaling-up;
• Facilitate multi-stakeholder dialogues on progress towards the implementation and  delivery of integrated care;
• Facilitate twinning and coaching activities that help regions and organisations to better  understand the local conditions that enable the successful deployment of integrated care

The SCIROCCO tool can be accessed online by using the following link ...

Case Management - Making a Unique Contribution to Integrated Care

The International Foundation for Integrated Care Australia (IFIC Australia) is going to introduce their second Webinar series. The core mission of IFIC Australia is to develop capacity and capabilities in Australia and the Asia Pacific Region in the design and delivery of integrated care. IFIC Australia seeks to achieve this by providing a platform to develop and exchange ideas and promote activities in the region in keeping with IFIC’s mission.

In this case, this webinar will explain case management as a care coordination strategy for individuals. Quality analysis and macro to micro practice issues are explored through examples.

ICIC20 – 20th International Conference on Integrated Care (Virtual Edition)

Self-management for chronic conditions in low- and middle-income countries: how can we know what works?

Self-management of chronic conditions is an approach to engaging people in their own health care. It places increased responsibility on the patient for monitoring their condition and their adherence to treatment. Wherever health systems are under resource strain, self-management is promoted as a means to increase patient investment in their treatment plan, thus improving treatment adherence and reducing use of costly services. Initiatives to support self-management have included text messaging reminders to monitor blood pressure or blood glucose, and community peer groups to support adherence to medications and lifestyle advice. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has further focused attention on self-management of chronic conditions, for example for vulnerable patients who are self-isolating.

Despite increased attention and resources devoted to self-management for chronic conditions, evidence of the effectiveness of self-management limited. This is particularly true in low- and middle-income countries, where self-management is proposed as one response to the challenges that ...

Realising Integrated Care

IFIC Ireland hosts and facilitates a series of six webinars titled ‘Realising Integrated Care’ which forms one of the key delivery mechanisms enabling knowledge mobilisation across all stakeholders with an interest in developing and implementing integrated care within the healthcare systems on the island of Ireland. 

Needs and resources of people with type 2 diabetes in peri-urban Cochabamba, Bolivia: a people-centred perspective

The rising prevalence of type 2 diabetes results in a worldwide public healthcare crisis, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with unprepared and overburdened health systems mainly focused on infectious diseases and maternal and child health. This study identifies mostly contextual factors like low literacy levels, linguistic problems in care, the need to articulate people’s worldview including traditional use of natural remedies with the Bolivian health system and the lack of expertise on type 2 diabetes by primary health care providers. Understanding the needs and structuring them in different areas wherein action is required serves as a foundation for the planning and evaluation of an integrated people centred care program for people with type 2 diabetes. This participative method serves as a tool to implement the often theoretical concept of integrated people centred health care in health policy and program development.

A Digital Health Platform for Integrated and Proactive Patient-Centered Multimorbidity Self-management and Care (ProACT):Protocol for an Action Research Proof-of-Concept Trial

Multimorbidity is defined as the presence of two or more chronic diseases and associated comorbidities. There is a need to improve best practices around the provision of well-coordinated, person-centered care for persons with multimorbidities. Present health systems across the European Union (EU) focus on supporting a single-disease framework of care; the primary challenge is to create a patient-centric, integrated care ecosystem to understand and manage multimorbidity. ProACT is a large-scale project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, that involved the design, development, and evaluation of a digital health platform to improve and advance home-based integrated care, and supported self-management, for older adults (aged ≥65 years) living with multimorbidity.

Long Term Exercise Engagement of Adults Living With Type Two Diabetes Is Enhanced by a Person-Centred Care Approach Delivered by Knowledgeable, Well Trained Health Care Professionals

Regular engagement in exercise or physical activity is a key evidence-based recommendation in the self-management of type 2 diabetes (T2D). This study explores Diabetes Community Exercise Programme (DCEP). The Diabetes Community Exercise Programme did motivate people with T2D to engage in exercise. Important to this was the emphasis on a person-centred approach that focussed on the health status monitoring and educational and social aspects of the programme, which in turn facilitated exercise engagement.

IFIC Scotland Integrated Care Matters: Webinar Series 7

IFIC Scotland and partners are delighted to announce the webinars in our Integrated Care Matters Series 7. This series will consider innovations in holistic and personalised approaches to integrated care and support.

Each webinar will be accompanied by a topic resource with links to further information. All who register will receive links to the recordings and topic resources.

Join us @IFICInfo #IFICScotland for #IntegratedCareMatters7