This report by the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust aims to support the development of the Department of Health’s national strategy on integrated care and to feed ideas directly into the ongoing work of the NHS Future Forum.
The report examines:
- the case for integrated care
- what current barriers to integrated care need to be overcome and how
- what the Department of Health can do to provide a supporting framework to enable integrated care to flourish
- options for practical and technical support to those implementing integrated care, including approaches to evaluating its impact.
The report asserts that developing integrated care should assume the same priority over the next decade as reducing waiting times had during the last.
Its core recommendations are:
- government policy should be founded on a clear, ambitious and measurable goal to improve the experience of patients and service users and to be delivered by a defined date
- patients with complex needs should be guaranteed an entitlement to an agreed care plan, a named case manager responsible for co-ordinating care, and access to telehealth and telecare and a personal health budget where appropriate
- change must be implemented at scale and pace; this will require work across large populations, significant reform and flexibility to take forward different approaches.