| Synopsis: |
Healthcare is increasingly under pressure. Budget crises are making collaboration and smart thinking essential, while increasing numbers of people with multiple long-term conditions make specialist models of healthcare increasingly inefficient - patients too often go from one specialist to another, duplicating effort and paying too little attention to the bigger picture of their health. This book outlines a solution: community-oriented integrated care and health promotion. Designed to prevent the problems of fragmented care, this approach focuses on building teams, networks and communities for health and care at local level, where it is easier to see the range of factors that affect people's health. With the emphasis on partnership-working between primary care, public health and others, it allows clusters of general practices to share the work of integrating efforts for care and health improvement, and for non-medical organisations to lead parallel initiatives for health and care. Introducing both horizontal and vertical integration, Thomas presents ways to develop community-oriented integrated care in a sustainable way, and how to practice the skills in small ways before you have to perform on a big stage. For example, systems theory allows you to envisage a system that has not yet been built; you can apply organisational learning in quiet safe places well before you develop a health community; you can practice team-working in everyday relationships, long before you build networks of high performing teams. This guide is for anyone interested in how multi-disciplinary primary care teams can orchestrate most aspects of health and care at local level, with timely specialist input. Those who lead integrating approaches to care and health promotion for local organisations, communities and networks will find practical things to try out. Those who teach, research, evaluate and plan integrated working will find theories to take into account. Policy-makers who lead, evaluate and advocate for integrated care and health promotion will find strategy to consider. |