Creating integrated health care

Creating the Right Sort of Ship to Achieve Integrated Care: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Care Integration – From “One Size Fits All” to Person Centred Care; Comment on “Achieving Integrated Care for Older People: Shuffling the Deckchairs or Making the System Watertight for the Future?”

Integrating services is a hot topic amongst health system policy-makers and healthcare managers. There is some evidence that integrated services deliver efficiencies and reduce service utilisation rates for some patient populations. In their article on Achieving Integrated Care for Older People, Gillian Harvey and her colleagues formulate some critical insights from practice and research around...

Including safety-net providers in integrated delivery systems: issues and options for policymakers.

Health care reform legislation has spurred efforts to develop integrated health care delivery systems that seek to coordinate the continuum of health services. These systems may be of particular benefit to patients who face barriers to accessing care or have multiple health conditions. But it remains to be seen how safety-net providers, including community health centers and public hospitals--w...

Urgent Care: the evolution of a revolution

The rapid and global growth of urgent care centers has had a revolutionary, though poorly understood, impact on the health care delivery system. The consumer-driven care model inherent in urgent care and other so-called convenience care models is permeating into more conventional health care models. In addition, physician and hospital payment models are evolving, especially in the United States...

Integrated Care: A Pill for All Ills?

There is an increasing policy emphasis on the integration of care, both within the healthcare sector and also between the health and social care sectors, with the simple aim of ensuring that individuals get the right care, in the right place, at the right time. However, implementing this simple aim is rather more complex. In this editorial, we seek to make sense of this complexity and ask: what...