Integrated care strategy, health and wellbeing board and joint forward plan guidance: what you need to know

Key points

• The Department for Health and Social Care has released guidance for:

1. the preparation of integrated care strategies by integrated care partnerships
2. health and wellbeing boards and how they will work with and within integrated care systems
3. principles for integrated care partnership engagement with adult social care providers
4. principles for integrated care partnership engagement with health overview and scrutiny committees.

• NHS England has released guidance on developing the joint forward plan, to support integrated care boards and their partner trusts to develop their first 5-year joint forward plans.
• Integrated care partnerships may wish to publish an initial interim strategy ...

Clinic for Multimorbidity: An Innovative Approach to Integrate General Practice and Specialized Health Care Services

Caring for patients with multimorbidity in general practice is increasing in amount and complexity. To integrate care for patients with multimorbidity and to support general practitioners (GPs), the Clinic for Multimorbidity (CM) was established in 2012 at Silkeborg Regional Hospital, Denmark. This case study aims to describe the CM and the patients seen in it.

Healthcare professionals’ experiences of job satisfaction when providing person-centred care: a systematic review of qualitative studies

This qualitative systematic review aimed to explore and synthesise healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) experiences of job satisfaction when providing person-centred care (PCC) in healthcare settings in Europe.

Ethical challenges and principles in integrated care

Integrated care is an established approach to delivery in parts of the healthcare infrastructure, and an ideal which, it is claimed, should be realized system-wide. Its ethical weight derives from its defence of a view about how healthcare ought to operate. Although the goal of integration is laudable, it is ethically and practically complex, involving trade-offs.

Patient-centredness in primary care walk-in clinics for refugees in Hamburg

The huge increase of refugees to Germany caused a great challenge to the health system. We aimed to examine the level of patient-centredness in medical consultations with refugee patients, aided by video interpreters in primary care walk-in clinics (PCWC) in Hamburg.

Primary care: the sleeping giant of research delivery

A sustainable NHS requires a shift from reactive acute care to proactive ambulatory care, from secondary care to primary care, with a focus on health creation by empowering people and communities. This will require evaluation of transformed models of care to create a new evidence base, which in turn requires a strong primary care research delivery infrastructure.

Learning from long COVID: integrated care for multiple long-term conditions

Long COVID is a multisystem condition requiring a range of medical, therapeutic, and psychological inputs. Given the complexity of the illness affecting multiple organ systems, often impacting physical and mental health, individuals can be heavy healthcare users across primary, secondary, and emergency services.

The long COVID clinics commissioned in England have provided an opportunity to innovate within a complex care pathway, bringing multiple providers together to meet needs broader than has been historically possible for many other complex conditions. Designing these new services from a blank page has enabled teams to co-create services with patient groups and work more effectively ...

Components and Outcomes in Under-and Postgraduate Medical Education to Prepare for the Delivery of Integrated Care for the Elderly: A Scoping Review

The ageing society requires physicians who can deliver integrated care, but it is unclear how they should be prepared for doing so. This scoping review aims to create an overview of educational programmes that prepare (future) physicians to deliver integrated care while addressing components and outcomes of the interventions.

Barriers and challenges to integrated care

Integrated care is critical to the successful delivery of modern day health and social care services, however the implementation into practice poses many barriers and challenges. This article seeks to identify these barriers and present methods through which to aim to address and overcome these.

WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care: annual report 2022

This report describes the activities of the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care in 2022. The Centre accelerated face-to-face country support after the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to support countries in engaging in analysis and diagnosis, developing strategies and policies, building capacity and tracking implementation progress and impact. The Centre delivered intensive support in the countries of the Universal Health Coverage Partnership. The Centre continued to develop policy guidance, publish good practices, have capacity-building activities and policy dialogues and solidified its signature product Let’s Talk Primary Health Care talk show platform. The highlight of 2022 was the ...