Integrated Care in Europe: Time to Get it Together?
Nowadays integrated care (IC) has become a term adopted across the world underpinning a positive attitude toward defragmentation of service provision inside health and social systems.
Since lack of healthcare coordination is often a major problem for chronic and frail patients, integration has certainly commendable aims. Striving for combining parts to form a whole, IC aims at optimizing care and treatments to patients and their caregivers. However, while the principles supporting IC are simple, their implementation is more controversial.
As it often happens in the health literature, IC has rapidly become an ‘umbrella concept’ open to various interpretations. After the ...