Main description:

Health care 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 health care 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.

Collaborating for Health 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 practise the skills in small ways before you have to perform on a big stage.

This guide is for anyone interested in how multidisciplinary primary care teams can orchestrate most aspects of health and care at local level, with timely specialist input.

Contents:

Introduction

Part I. Policy to support integrated working

Chapter 1. Communities for health

Chapter 2. Shared care for long-term conditions

Chapter 3. Seasons of learning and change

Chapter 4. Infrastructure of facilitation and communication

Part II. Integrating care and promoting health from local organisations

Chapter 5. Annual cycles of participatory action research

Chapter 6. Live manuals

Chapter 7. How to see connections between parts and wholes

Chapter 8. How to run meetings that make sense of multiple perspectives

Part III. Integrating care and promoting health from geographic localities

Chapter 9. Engaging people in cycles of inter-organisational learning and change

Chapter 10. Large group events help people to creatively interact

Chapter 11. Structured inquiry - an important ingredient

Chapter 12. Maintain inner peace

Part IV. Understanding community-oriented integrated care

Chapter 13. The story of community-oriented integrated care

Chapter 14. General practitioners are sense-makers

Chapter 15. Health, identity and relationships

Chapter 16. Three paradigms of inquiry illuminate evolving stories

Part V. Community-oriented integrated care - making it work

Chapter 17. Networks for complicated journeys

Chapter 18. Developing team players and systems thinkers

Chapter 19. Learning organisations build teams and communities

Chapter 20. Public health and primary care - an essential partnership

Appendix: Skills to lead community-oriented integrated care

Bibliography