INTEGRATED CARE PILOTS

National Evaluation of the Department of Health's Integrated Care Pilots

National Evaluation of the Department of Health's Integrated Care Pilots

Introduction

Public healthcare is one the emerging concerns of public health policy across United Kingdom and all over the world. With increasing in scope of demand of public healthcare and social care combined with the fact that there is a large percentage of old aged people, more and more public health care policies are focusing on delivering new methods and types of treatments which deliver effective healthcare delivery to people at large (McEvoy, 2003). Further, UK population's expectations are also changing which are now looking for more conducive and flexible integrated care methods which could improve the interventions to occur many diseases in older people. An effort has been made for thought of improving effectiveness of those interventions with the help of integrated care pilot which not only bring reforms to healthcare industry but also increasingly address the changing healthcare needs of people across the United Kingdom. This has led not only the government of U.K but also other governments and policy makers which are engaged in development of public healthcare policy (Stetler, 2009).

To accelerate the integrated care needs possibilities with full potential, a two year programme has been initiated called Integrated Care Pilots (ICP) by English Department of Health with objective of exploring different strategies and methods which not only promote health and social care services among people at large but also to promote wellbeing of citizens of Great Britain (Rycroft-Malone et al, 2004). This two-year initiative step not only focus on delivering healthcare needs of increasing elder population of country but also to provide healthcare needs of three other groups other than older population which includes first, people that are dealing with sever medical problems such as diabetes, chronic lung and cardiovascular disease or other patients with diseases which demand increasing emergency hospital admissions, second, people dealing with mental healthcare problems or at high risk of dementia and other diseases, and finally the people that are heavily indulged in substance and drug abuse which includes child, adults and elder population across the country. ICP promises to deliver this objective with ease because it is based on foundation stones of integration which constitutes systems, partnership and models, organizations expanded to primary care, social care, secondary care and community care centres. Participated by more than 16 pilot sites in this wider basis national programme as shown in figure 1 (see appendix), the programme aims to deliver healthcare reforms to people across the U.K. All sixteen participants have proposed a model named integrated model which is designed as strategy and framework to pursue the goals of delivery healthcare needs to local populace. The integration aims to deliver the healthcare services to be more flexible, seamless and personalized. Thus, integration model is basically focusing on model which new ways of working with different group of people to achieve a common pursuit of delivery healthcare needs (Dimaggio, ...