Integrated health and community systems strengthening for improved contraceptive access and uptake in Nampula province, Mozambique

As with all types of interventions, the integration of health services demands an adjustment to contextual characteristics, ranging from the burden of disease to society and culture. Thus, in developing countries across Africa, efforts towards the integration of health services overwhelmingly focus on communicable diseases and family planning, and aim to involve existing community structures in the delivery of health services.

Such is the case of the USAID-funded Strengthening Communities through Integrated Programming (SCIP) project in Nampula province, Mozambique. This project, implemented from 2009 to 2015 by Pathfinder International and its partners, worked to increase access to contraceptive services by ...

What does it take to make integrated care work?: A ‘cookbook’ for large-scale deployment of coordinated care and telehealth. A personalised approach that will benefit patients in your organisation.

Evidence on integrated care is not only needed to show which interventions work, but also to understand how organisational processes affect these interventions. Therefore, evidence from large-scale implementations is especially important. In October 2015, the consortium of the EU-funded programme 'Advancing Care Coordination and Telehealth Deployment' (ACT) published a ‘cookbook’ of good practices, focusing on the structural and organisational drivers as well as barriers to large-scale deployment of care coordination and telehealth in five European regions. The report centres on chronic patients and elderly people, giving recommendations regarding staff engagement,  patient adherence, risk stratification and programme assessment. The report does ...

Acute hospitals and integrated care

In March 2015, the King’s Fund published a report regarding the progress made by five acute hospital providers in England towards developing more integrated models of care. According to the report, becoming more closely integrated with primary care has proved a considerable challenge for these hospitals. This is partly due to the lack of alternatives to building relationships on a practice-by-practice basis. As the report explains, GP provider groups or federations “are still at an early stage of development in many areas of the country, and where they do exist it is not always clear that they are sufficiently ...