Integrated care or person centred care?

At the 6th "Right Care" Conference of the Clinical Management Section of the Societat Catalana de Gestió Sanitària we had the opportunity to get to know Don Redding, director of Policy and Partnerships for National Voices of the National Health Service and a well known promoter of the involving people in their own clinical processes. Redding said that the integration of services doesn’t make any sense if it’s intended only as an exercise of resource rationalization. On the contrary, he argued that coordination must be conceived based on the specific needs of each person, stating that every patient can be involved in their own care plan in agreement with close involved professionals and working as a team to achieve outcomes perceived as valuable by the patients themselves.

About the 16th International Conference on Integrated Care

Last week, Barcelona was the host of the 16th International Conference on Integrated Care, a conference that brought together more than one thousand of health and social professionals in order to discuss the integration of services in response to the fragmented practice. Nick Goodwin, President of the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC) in the Conference’s presentation video says that we often think about the integration of services as a mechanism for reducing unnecessary hospitalizations, or even to reduce costs of the waste caused by lack of coordination and inappropriate actions, but Goodwin points out that we should make no mistake: the main objective of this movement is to generate opportunities for care coordination in order to improve the experience and quality of life of patients, especially of those in need of complex health and social care.