Category: Integrated Care

Introducing integrated care systems

Joining up local services to improve health outcomes

Source: The King’s Fund

This report examines the setup of integrated care systems (ICSs) by the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, and their partners and the risks they must manage. The report is not an assessment of whether the programme has secured good value for money to date because ICSs have only recently taken statutory form. Instead, it is an assessment of where they are starting from and the challenges and opportunities ahead. It makes recommendations intended to help manage those risks and realise those opportunities.

Public Health

Identifying The Gap: Understanding The Drivers Of Inequality In Public Health

This report aims to provide insights into the historical challenges and approaches taken to tackle the problems affecting public health. Key findings include the need for: longer-term funding and commissioning cycles, investment in the public health workforce; and for public health to be recognised and valued as an integral part of the integrated care system.

Developing place-based partnerships

The foundation of effective integrated care systems

Source: The King’s Fund Integrated Care Bulletin

The new report from King’s Fund considers the potential of place-based partnerships to improve population health and truly support integrated care, and highlights principles to guide their development and the support they might need from regional and national leaders.

For more information click here.

NHS Confederation

From place-based to place-led: a whole-area integrating care systems

This paper describes the essential role of place-based approaches in taking forward the NHS reform agenda. Based on interviews with senior leaders, it seeks to provide further insight into how local systems can make progress in designing and delivering place-based, integrated care. In particular, it describes what system leaders can do to make this happen.

Read the paper here

It takes leaders to break down siloes: Integrating services for disabled children –

Council for Disabled Children, July 2019

Over the past decade, successive governments have brought in a range of legislation, policies and programmes in an attempt to deliver on a vision of coordinated, person-centred care and better outcomes for children and young people with SEND. However, despite this visible drive towards integration, services for children with SEND remain fragmented. The reality of integrated working between different services and agencies, such as NHS and local authority services, children’s and adults’ services and specialist and universal services, is challenging. The report identifies key factors that are helping and hindering the integration of services around special education needs and disability (SEND). The report finds that:

  • • The system of disabled children’s services, nationally and locally, is highly complex and fragmented. Those who work in it face multiple practical barriers to integration.
  • Leadership is the most important factor in enabling or hindering integration; service leaders play a pivotal role in uniting agencies around a whole-system approach to SEND and wider vulnerable children’s services.
  • Good quality population data is vital to developing a whole-system approach, and the measurement of shared outcomes.
  • Local Areas’ efforts to integrate services in the complex SEND system must be part of a wider strategic vision

Click here to view the full report.

Leadership in integrated care systems: Report prepared for the NHS Leadership Academy: (Future of Care Number 9)

Social Care Institute for Excellence, November 2018
This Future of Care paper, aimed at chief executives, directors and senior managers from the NHS, local authorities, housing organisations and voluntary and community sector, is based on findings from interviews with systems leaders and a review of the literature. The NHS Leadership Academy commissioned SCIE to undertake this research to further expand the understanding of systems leadership and leadership of integrated care systems. The research will inform the Leadership Academy’s long-term plans for supporting leaders in integrated care systems. Quotes from these leaders are presented throughout the report.
Click here to view the full report.

A Year Of Integrated Care Systems: Reviewing The Journey So Far

The King’s Fund, September 2018
Integrated care systems represent a fundamental and far-reaching change in how the NHS works across different services and with external partners. This report is based on interviews with eight of the ‘first wave’ integrated care systems to understand how they are developing and to identify lessons for local systems and national policy-makers.
Click here to view the full report.