The State of Health Care Integration in Estonia

This paper summarizes an assessment of the state of health care integration in Estonia and its driving forces. In the absence of a widely accepted definition, this study defines health care integration as:

i) the delivery of care in the appropriate care setting and

ii) coordination and continuity of care across care settings.

The study focuses on integration issues related to the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases, with particular attention to the role and functioning of primary care and equity issues. The findings of this analysis therefore do not provide a comprehensive assessment of quality within specific care settings ...

Systems, not structures: Changing Health & Social Care

In his speech of 4 November 2015, the then Minister for Health, Simon Hamilton MLA, announced that in response to recommendation 1 of The Right Time, The Right Place report by Sir Liam Donaldson, he would appoint an expert, clinically led panel to consider and lead an informed debate on the best configuration of Health and Social Care services in NI.

The Panel was appointed in January 2016 and comprised local and international members.

PANEL MEMBERS

Professor Rafael Bengoa (Chair)
Dr Alan Stout
Bronagh Scott
Mairead McAlinden
Mr Mark A Taylor

EXPERT ADVICE ON SOCIAL CARE WAS PROVIDED BY:

Sean ...

Priorities for the NHS and social care in 2017

How a Gender-sensitive Quality Improvement Approach Supports Integrated People-centered Health Services

Clients, family and friends, communities, and health providers are all influenced by the culture they live in and by that culture’s perspectives on gender. To ignore gender is to ignore a vital part of the people and their local context that the WHO framework aims to center. Gender must be considered in order to have truly people-centered health services. A gender-sensitive approach takes the different needs, constraints, and opportunities of women, men, girls, and boys into account and responds to them strategically in program design, implementation, and evaluation. By considering and responding to these differences, health services are more ...

Supporting self-management: A guide to enabling behaviour change for health and wellbeing using person- and community-centred approaches

This guide outlines how the science of behaviour can help people to self-manage their health and wellbeing.

Key findings

• The guide uses the EAST framework to organise ideas and examples. The core message of EAST is that if you want to encourage a behaviour, you should make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.
• The guide features a number of low-tech, pragmatic and manageable activities which can increase the spread of person- and community-centred health and wellbeing programmes.

This action-focused guide is part of the NHS England-funded Realising the Value programme, which seeks to develop person- and community-centred approaches for health ...

Spreading change: A guide to enabling the spread of person- and community-centred approaches for health and wellbeing

This guide outlines how behavioural science can help spread the take-up of person- and community-centred approaches to health and wellbeing.

Key findings

•     The guide uses the EAST framework to organise ideas and examples. The core message of EAST is that if you want to encourage a behaviour, you should make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.
•     The guide features a number of low-tech, pragmatic and manageable activities which can increase the spread of person- and community-centred health and wellbeing programmes.

This action-focused guide is part of the NHS England-funded Realising the Value programme, which seeks to develop person- and community-centred ...

“Informed choice” in a time of too much medicine—no panacea for ethical difficulties

Providing information to enable informed choices about healthcare sounds immediately appealing to most of us. But Minna Johansson and colleagues argue that preventive medicine and expanding disease definitions have changed the ethical premises of informed choice and our good intentions may inadvertently advance overmedicalisation

The idea of informed patients who make reasoned decisions about their treatment based on personal preferences is appealing in a Western cultural context, with its focus on the autonomous individual. Rightly, many doctors now reject paternalism if the patient does not specifically ask for it. They prefer to elicit the patient’s preferences and embrace an ...

Voices on person-centred care

What is person-centred care to a patient, a physician, a nurse, a hospital head of department, an industry representative and a researcher? How do these people, who all have experience of receiving or working with person-centred care, see person-centred care from their perspectives? Short film clips from the University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-centred Care - GPCC. GPCC is an in terdisciplinary research centre, established in January 2010, with the support of the Swedish government's strategic investment in health and care research. Uniquely GPCC has evaluated the effects of person-centred care in controlled studies. This has established that person-centred care ...

Developing a Framework for Evaluating the Patient Engagement, Quality, and Safety of Mobile Health Applications

Rising ownership of smartphones and tablets across social and demographic groups has made mobile applications, or apps, a potentially promising tool for engaging patients in their health care, particularly those with high health care needs. Through a systematic search of iOS (Apple) and Android app stores and an analysis of apps targeting individuals with chronic illnesses, this issue brief assesses the degree to which apps are likely to be useful in patient engagement efforts. Usefulness was determined based on the following criteria: description of engagement, relevance to the targeted patient population, consumer ratings and reviews, and most recent app update ...

WHO’s global survey on assistive technologies

WHO has launched a global survey to gather views on the most necessary and useful assistive technologies such as hearing aids and wheel chairs. The survey will feed into the first ever WHO mandated list of essential assistive technologies, similar to the WHO Essential Medicines List. These practical tools – some low, some higher technologies – are becoming increasingly necessary to the many people in high- and middle-income countries who are living longer due to better healthcare. Similar devices are used by people with disabilities, allowing them to live more autonomously and participate in their communities. This list will represent a tool ...