Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has worked on a wide range of linked integrated care initiatives particularly focused on improving care pathways for older people.

This is being undertaken alongside, and is fundamental to, work in building a new specialist emergency hospital to deliver 24/7 consultant-led urgent care.

Since taking on responsibility for community health services and adult social care in 2011, the Trust initiatives have included:

• creating a single point of access to care
• specialist programmes to support high-risk patients
• urgent specialist elderly assessment, admission avoidance and discharge liaison using multidisciplinary teams working flexibly across hospital and community interfaces, and
• targeted additional community support.

In the video below Derek Thompson, Medical Director, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, describes the experience of integrating care in Northumberland and North Tyneside.