IPCHS. Integrated People-Centred Health Services

Publications

This growing repository holds WHO documents, scientific publications, policy documents, implementation reports, presentations and others with information and insights about integrated people-centred health services. Share your publication by clicking “Add publication”.

June 17, 2020 Global

Family medicine in times of ‘COVID-19’: A generalists' voice

The novel coronavirus epidemic is transforming the world in which we live. This pandemic will bring sweeping changes everywhere, not least in the field of primary care medicine. Overall, this pandemic has genuinely demonstrated the medical professional’s power to adapt, evolve and thrive, even in these times of unprecedented crisis. Family medicine, dealing with both the emotional and the scientific side of medicine on a daily basis, plays a central role in tackling this pandemic. Taking responsibility for both care and research on COVID-19 will redefine the importance of family medicine for public health care. 

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June 10, 2020 Global

Rethinking Integrated Care: A Systematic Hermeneutic Review of the Literature on Integrated Care Strategies and Concepts

Integrated care is a broad concept, used to describe a connected set of clinical, organizational, and policy changes aimed at improving service efficiency, patient experience, and outcomes. Despite examples of successful integrated care systems, evidence for consistent and reproducible benefits remains elusive. This review identified four perspectives on integrated care: patients’ perspectives, organizational strategies and policies, conceptual models, and theoretical and critical analysis.

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May 29, 2020 Global

Framework Implementation of the inspire ICOPE-Care program in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Occitania Region

Limiting the number of dependent older people in coming years will be a major economic and human challenge. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed the «Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE)» approach. The aim of the ICOPE program is to enable as many people as possible to age in good health. To reach this objective, the WHO proposes to follow the trajectory of an individual’s intrinsic capacity, which is the composite of all their physical and mental capacities and comprised of multiple domains including mobility, cognition, vitality / nutrition, psychological state, vision, hearing.

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May 25, 2020 Americas Europe Western Pacific Global

The Odyssey of Integration: Is Management its Achilles’ Heel?

The importance of management to the implementation of integrated care is recognised in evidence and practice. Despite this recognition, there is a lack of clarity about what ‘good’ management of integrated care looks like, if the competences are different to management for ‘traditional’ care, and how such competences can be acquired.

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May 15, 2020 Global

Realising the True Value of Integrated Care: Beyond COVID-19

Stronger and more resilient care systems and communities are better able to cope, respond and adapt to new challenges and crises such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They are able to quickly come together to ‘act as one’ and collaborate across disciplines and sectors towards a common goal. This is the essence of integrated care and this is what the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC) stands for – creating a more connected health and care system.

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April 24, 2020 Europe Global

Covid-19: a remote assessment in primary care

Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) is an urgent and spreading threat whose clinical and epidemiological characteristics are still being documented. With a view to containing covid-19, a shift from in-person to remote consulting is occurring. Clinicians are thus faced with a new disease and a new way of interacting with patients. This article will present some guiding principles on how to choose between telephone and video appointments, how to conduct a “query covid” consultation remotely, and considerations when arranging follow-up and next steps.

 

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April 24, 2020 Global

Not a luxury: a call to maintain sexual and reproductive health in humanitarian and fragile settings during the COVID-19 pandemic

About 1·8 billion people live in fragile contexts worldwide,1 including 168 million individuals in need of humanitarian assistance. Approximately a quarter of those in fragile contexts are women and girls of reproductive age. Experience from past epidemics in these settings has showed that discontinuing healthcare services deemed unrelated to the epidemic response resulted in more deaths than did the epidemic itself. The COVID-19 pandemic will magnify the risks inherent to resource reshuffling at the expense of other services; however, sexual and reproductive health cannot be viewed as a luxury.

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April 17, 2020 Global

Comparing International Models of Integrated Care: How Can We Learn Across Borders?

Providers, managers, health system leaders, and researchers could learn across countries implementing system-wide models of integrated care, but require accessible methods to do so. This study assesses if a common framework could describe and compare key components of international models of integrated care.

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April 8, 2020 Global

Innovative Integrated Health And Social Care Programs In Eleven High-Income Countries

High-income countries face the challenge of providing effective and efficient care to the relatively small proportion of their populations with high health and social care needs. Recent reports suggest that integrated health and social care programs target specific high-needs population segments, coordinate health and social care services to meet their clients’ needs, and engage clients and their caregivers. We identified thirty health and social care programs in eleven high-income countries that delivered care in new ways. We used a structured survey to characterize the strategies and activities used by these programs to identify and recruit clients, coordinate care, and engage ...

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