There is a new energy across Europe to develop integrated care that will make a difference not only to the experience that people have of health care, but which also aims to add at least two healthy years of life for all EU citizens by 2020.
The Integrated Care Collaborative is an action group within the European Commission's Innovation Partnership on active and healthy ageing that is bringing together health care delivery organizations, patients and service user organizations together with academic and industry to find examples of current approaches to integrated care that can be adopted more widely and to find innovative approaches to integration that can be developed at a larger scale.
The European Forum for Primary Care (EFPC) takes part in this Integrated Care Collaborative and is supporting the collaborative by encouraging its members to contribute examples from their regions of good practice in integrated care. This will contribute to building up a rich picture of how integrated care is already promising improvements for patients, particularly for older people with long-term conditions.
Examples of good practice can include organizational models; approaches to change management and workforce development; recruitment strategies; multi-professional approaches; new approaches to team building and managing across boundaries; new ways of thinking about patient care pathways or of supporting patients and service users in aspects of self-management; or examples of how new technologies are supporting integrated care.
INPUT REQUEST
The Integrated Care Collaborative is eager to hear about examples from across the EU and the European Forum for Primary Care is encouraging its members to get in contact to share examples that could add to the current picture and which could inform future health system investment. From its recent conference in Istanbul ‘Balancing the primary care and secondary care provision for more integration and better health outcomes!’ the EFPC will already list some of the examples described by delegates but if you have good local examples of integrated care, please share these with the European Primary Care Forum [email protected] and we will make sure these examples will be forwarded to the Integrated Care Collaborative.
The EFPC is looking forward to your response!