Integrated community care (ICC) engages people and communities as co-producers of care. It implies a shift in traditional thinking based on problem-based, disease-oriented care to a goal-based, person-centred care aiming at enhancing the quality of life of vulnerable individuals and improving population health amongst communities.
This entails the development of new forms of collaborations across diverse contexts and settings. A key to such collaborations is the role of people in the community and in how service users (individuals, carer and families) become engaged and empowered as an integral part of integrated community care delivery.
The Transnational Forum on Integrated Community Care (TransForm) is a joint initiative of Foundations in and beyond Europe that aims to put the community at the centre of primary care and integrated care. It seeks to combine strengths-based and needs-based approaches to enabling communities to develop their own models of caring for their people.
The first conference “Making the case for Integrated Community Care”, grounded in both evidence and practical experience, made the compelling case for investment in integrated community care as a policy priority to support effective, high-quality and sustainable care. The conference took place in Hamburg, Germany, on 24-25-26 September 2018.
The conference “Towards people-driven care: engaging and empowering individuals, carers and families through integrated community care” focused on examining the essential elements related to engaging and empowering people in the management of their own health and welfare in the context of where they live. This includes a focus on aspects that help people understand their talents and needs (e.g. health and care literacy, self-care, and access to health records).
The third conference “Building stronger communities through integrated community care” focused on how to engage communities as pro-active co-producers of their health and how care systems can support an assets-based approach to community development. Specifically, the conference examined how to enable the participation and engagement of communities in decision-making, including an examination of responding to different cultural contexts and the building of social capital.
The fourth transnational conference will seek to assess how the spread and sustainability of integrated community care can be supported to achieve change at scale. It will analyse the key lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic and how ICC reinforces community strengths and emphasises prevention. It would also examine issues related to more effective evaluation methods to both demonstrate impact, but also to provide the essential information that can support quality improvements over time to enable integrated community care programmes to grow and mature.
Blog author: Anna Coote, Principal Fellow, New Economics Foundation
Blog author: Antoine Boivin, Manuel Penafiel, Ghislaine Rouly, Valérie Lahaie, Marie-Pierre Cods, Mathieu Isabel, Brian White-Guay
Blog author: Cormac Russell – Co-written by Al Smith, Jono Byrne, Mark Upton and Richard Martin