Clinical leadership and integrated primary care: A systematic literature review

As numbers of chronically ill patients with complex healthcare needs are increasing, primary care professionals will be challenged to deliver integrated care. Integrated care is about ‘delivering seamless care for patients with complex long-term problems cutting across multiple services, providers and settings.
Leaders are needed to address healthcare changes essential for implementation of integrated primary care. What kind of leadership this needs, which professionals should fulfil this role and how these leaders can be supported remains unclear.

Reconceptualising Person-Centered Service Models as Social Ecology Networks in Supporting Integrated Care

Efforts to address problems such as mental health, poverty, social exclusion, and chronic disease have often proven resistant to traditional policies or interventions. This paper takes up the challenge and present a pioneering new method of analysis in drawing on theoretical and methodological extensions of two prominent approaches, namely, social network analysis and developmental social ecology. Considered in combination, these two seemingly disparate approaches frame a powerful new way of thinking about person-centred care, as well as offer a methodologically more rigorous set of analytical tools. The conceptual model developed from this combination offers to bridge the apparent disconnect between ...

Challenges to patient centredness – a comparison of patient and doctor experiences from primary care

Many countries and international organisations, such as OECD and WHO, have chosen patient centredness as the approach to ensure that the patients’ needs, values, and preferences are appropriately considered in the health care meetings. Whereas most OECD countries show progress in implementing patient-centred care, no country performs in the top group on all indicators in cross-country comparison. Patient-centred consultation methodologies vary, but reoccurring components can be identified in the literature, such as the patient’s narrative and collaboration.
This article designed an observational study to investigate the level of patients’ and doctors’ ratings of patient-centred aspects of the primary care ...

Citizens as Active Participants in Integrated Care: Challenging the Field’s Dominant Paradigms

Policy makers, practitioners and academics often claim that care users and other citizens should be ‘at the center’ of care integration pursuits. Nonetheless, the field of integrated care tends to approach these constituents as passive recipients of professional and managerial efforts. This paper critically reflects on this discrepancy, which, it contend, indicates both a key objective and an ongoing challenge of care integration;  the need to reconcile the professional, organizational and institutional frameworks by which care work is structured with  the diversity and diffuseness that is inherent to pursuits of active user and citizen participation. 

The role of patient value and patient-centred care in health systems

Patient-centred care, with its emphasis on patient value, is a widespread health system goal. To examine the progress of the evolution towards more patient-centred health care and draw lesson for the future, the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a survey and interviews on patient representatives, a cohort in which IAPO was present. However, the findings show that despite some progress, especially in Europe and the US, in practice such care often remains more aspiration than reality.

A compendium of tools and resources for improving the quality of health services

In an attempt to consolidate the work of the WHO Department of Service Delivery and Safety (SDS) on quality improvement, a SDS cross-cut team has produced a compendium of tools and resources on quality improvement, developed within the SDS, that are applicable for country support. It includes resources on IPCHS and community engagement among others. It also includes practical examples of how the tools and resources have been applied in-country, including relevant links with other areas, such as measurement.  Ministries of health, facility quality improvement teams, researchers, development agencies and any organization or individual working to improve the quality of ...

Community-Based Social Innovations

This research defined CBSIs as community initiatives that seek to: a) empower older people to improve their self-efficacy in caring for themselves and their peers; b) maintain their well-being and; c) promote social cohesion and inclusiveness. Health systems across both developed and developing regions struggle to meet the diverse and complex needs of increasing number of older persons. This study hypothesized that community based social innovations (CBSIs) can improve the health and well-being of older people through community-based care. 

Moving from the margins: the challenges of building integrated local services – a discussion paper by Collaborate and Turning Point

Moving from the margins is a discussion paper produced by Collaborate and Turning Point that presents seven key insights for building integrated public services.

The overriding message for Moving from the Margins: The challenges of building integrated local services is simple: local integrated services should be at the heart of strategies for social renewal and public service reform. The fundamental change that this approach implies – shifting power away from ‘producers’ and towards communities – is incredibly hard to make happen. But there are people and places that have started to do things differently and their approaches can be learned from and ...

Person-centred Care Around the World

This directory of person-centred care organisations around the world was produced as part of an international environment scan of the field of person-centred care undertaken by Health Policy Partnership. This useful tool highlights the leading international centres working on similar aspects of person-centred care to the Health Foundation. The tool can help to identify person-centred care research, measurement and implementation ‘hot spots’ in different settings globally. The tool enables collaboration between those working on person-centred care by providing key information on the type of work being undertaken on person-centred care. Please share this tool with contacts and colleagues to encourage ...

How Equity-Oriented Health Care Affects Health: Key Mechanisms and Implications for Primary Health Care Practice and Policy

Significant attention has been directed toward addressing health inequities at the population health and systems levels, yet little progress has been made in identifying approaches to reduce health inequities through clinical care, particularly in a primary health care context. Although the provision of equity?oriented health care (EOHC) is widely assumed to lead to improvements in patients’ health outcomes, little empirical evidence supports this claim. To remedy this, this study tested whether more EOHC predicts more positive patient health outcomes and identified selected mediators of this relationship