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”.

Feb. 6, 2023 Western Pacific

Reflecting on challenges and opportunities for the practice of person-centred rehabilitation

Challenges

Person-centred practice has received widespread endorsement across healthcare settings and is understood to be an important, positive approach in rehabilitation. However, the rhetoric of this approach does not always translate meaningfully into practice. Emphasis on patient choice, patient involvement in decision making, and increasing patient capacity for self-management have become a proxy for person-centred rehabilitation in lieu of a more fundamental shift in practice and healthcare structures. System (e.g. biomedical orientation), organisational (e.g. key performance indicators) and professional (e.g. identity as expert) factors compete with person-centred rehabilitation.

Opportunities

Four key recommendations for the development of person-centred ...

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Feb. 6, 2023 Americas

Nursing Care Coordination in Primary Healthcare for Patients with Complex Needs: A Comparative Case Study

Despite nurses’ substantial role in care coordination, few education programs exist to better support them in this role. Identification of a set of core care coordination activities across heterogeneous care coordination programs would facilitate the development of a standard of practice. We sought to examine care coordination activities across two care coordination programs in Family Medicine Groups in Quebec, and their relationship to the program design.

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Jan. 24, 2023 Africa

Adaptation and validation of the Ugandan Primary Care Assessment Tool

Health systems based on primary health care (PHC) have better outcomes at lower cost. Such health systems need regular performance assessment for quality improvement and maintenance. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), there are no electronic databases for routine monitoring. There is an urgent need for valid and reliable tools to measure PHC performance.
This study aimed to adapt and validate the Primary Care Assessment Tool (PCAT) in the Ugandan context.
 
The South African Primary Care Assessment Tool (ZA PCAT) was adapted and validated with an additional domain on person-centredness to measure primary care performance in the Ugandan context ...

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Jan. 20, 2023 Europe

Promoting Integrated Care Across the World

In March 2022, the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC) launched its first survey across its network asking people to share their views on what integrated care means to them and the features of integrated care that they thought were most important in their experience and context.

At IFIC we think it is important that we understand how this concept is being used in practice to change and improve care for people and communities. We believe that as both the science and practice of integrated care evolve over time, the definition of integrated care is and will probably always be ...

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Jan. 19, 2023 Americas

Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE): an innovative model of integrated geriatric care and financing

The Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) is a long-term care delivery and financing innovation. A major goal of PACE is prevention of unnecessary use of hospital and nursing home care.

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Jan. 19, 2023 Europe

Knowledge management in a regional integrated health and social care system

This article analyses a major healthcare and social welfare reform establishing new regional and integrated wellbeing services counties in Finland. The authors approach the reform and service integration as a knowledge management (KM) issue and analyse how KM appears and contributes in the context of integrated care, specifically in the process of integrating social and health care.

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Jan. 16, 2023 Europe

How can skill-mix innovations support the implementation of integrated care for people with chronic conditions and multimorbidity?

  • The increasing and changing demands of complex patients (with chronic conditions and multimorbidity), combined with growing workloads and shortages of primary care providers, demand the reorganization of services for more patient-centred and more efficient care.
  • Reorganizing health and social care services to integrate care requires that the health workforce adopt “skill-mix changes” including reskilling; a different approach to sharing tasks and roles; and improved coordination.
  • Skill mix changes typically involve innovative re-allocation of tasks between professions; new supplementary roles; and/or the introduction of greater teamworking and flexibility.
  • The most promising skill-mix innovations for improving integration of care of patients ...

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Jan. 16, 2023 Europe

Integrated brief interventions for noncommunicable disease risk factors in primary care: the manual: BRIEF project

Brief interventions are recognized by WHO as an effective measure to help people quit tobacco, reduce or stop alcohol use and increase physical activity. They can also help to achieve and maintain healthy eating behaviours and manage weight for those living with overweight and obesity. Brief interventions can translate to significant health benefits at population level when systematically applied to a large proportion of people. The uptake of these interventions in the WHO European Region, however, remains low. This manual is an integral part of the WHO European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases BRIEF project. The ...

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Jan. 11, 2023 Europe

Priorities in integrating primary and secondary care: a multimethod study of GPs

Throughout the world, healthcare policy has committed to delivering integrated models of care. The interface between primary–secondary care has been identified as a particularly challenging area in this regard. To that end, this study aimed to examine the issue of integrated care from general practitioners’ (GPs) perspectives in Ireland.

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Jan. 11, 2023 Europe

How do clients with multiple problems and (in)formal caretakers coproduce integrated care and support? A longitudinal study on integrated care trajectories of clients with multiple problems

Integrated care can create several advantages, such as better quality of care and better outcomes. These advantages apply especially to clients with multiple problems (CWMPs) who have multiple, interconnected needs that span health and social issues and require different health care (e.g., mental health care or addiction care), social care (e.g., social benefits) and welfare services at the same time. Integrated care is most often studied as a phenomenon taking place at the system, organizational, professional and clinical levels. Therefore, in many studies, clients seem to be implicitly conceptualized as passive recipients of care. Less research has been ...

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