Paradoxes of person centred care: A discussion paper

Starting the Transition Towards Integrated Community Care 4all

Integrated Community Care (ICC) is a new concept that has been launched by the international partnership of philanthropic organisations known as TransForm which came into being in 2018. The TransForm partners are convinced of the value of investing time, resources and imagination to enhance the capacity of local communities to deal with public health issues and the care needs of community members throughout their whole lifetime. The Covid-19 crisis may be a turning-point. It is giving us a unique opportunity to acknowledge ICC as a systemic approach that blurs boundaries between informal and formal care, between different skills in the ...

Leveraging service design for healthcare transformation: toward people-centered, integrated, and technology-enabled healthcare systems

This paper explores how service design can contribute to the evolution of health service systems, moving them toward people-centered, integrated and technology-enabled care; the paper develops a research agenda to leverage service design research for healthcare transformation.

Defining Coordinated Care for People with Rare Conditions: A Scoping Review

To coordinate care effectively for rare conditions, we need to understand what coordinated care means. This review aimed to define coordinated care and identify components of coordinated care within the context of rare diseases; by drawing on evidence from chronic conditions. Coordinated care is multi-faceted and has both generic and context-specific components. Findings can help to develop and eventually test different ways of coordinating care for people with rare and common chronic conditions.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Universal access to essential health information: accelerating progress towards universal health coverage and other SDG health targets

The information that people need to protect and manage their own health and the health of those for whom they are responsible is a fundamental element of an effective people-centred healthcare system. Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) requires universal access to essential health information. While it was recently recognised by the World Medical Association, universal access to essential health information is not yet reflected in official monitoring of progress on UHC for the sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this paper, we outline key features that characterise universal access to essential health information and indicate how it is increasingly achievable. 

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.