Integrated working means professionals from different professions
coming together to work together with shared purpose,
which is around improving outcomes and the experience of people who use services.
The problem with the term integrated working is, at the last count,
which was done by The King's Fund,
there were 175 different definitions of integrated working.
Integrated working means different things to different people.
In this short film we'll look at this from five perspectives:
Research
Policy
Organisational
Practitioner
and Service Users and Carers
What does integrated working mean to you?
Integrated working to me means, a model of service delivery that implies connectivity,
collaboration, cooperation and that can be either between organisations
or between professionals working within the same organisation.
The end impact is an improved service for service users.
Integration is important because it has the promise at least of
the best contributions of the different professions and the different agencies.
For me when I talk about integrated working,
what I actually think is the importance of integrated care.
And for me integrated care is about person-centred coordinated care.
It's the person, the patient, the carer and their family as the organising principle
for why it is that we've all joined the health and social care system.
We've heard a very clear message from people about health and wellbeing boards
that most people in the country actual welcome the opportunity to have
a space where commissioners from the local authority from health
can meet together with the population and patients to discuss what's necessary,
to agree priorities and to join up what are currently some fairly disjointed services.
For me integrated working is really a way of organising delivery around the patient,
and in my experience that works most effectively
when we're dealing with patients that have complex needs.
So people who have multiple touch points across multiple systems.
I think from the first time we went out as part of the consultation asked people
what they wanted to see, they just wanted to be able to go to one person
and have all of their needs met, regardless which of the organisations
they currently happened to work for.
And they talked us through the number of assessments that they had to undertake,
the number of contact points that they had and for me integration is just about
taking that out and managing that behind the scenes of the organisation.
And to the person that we're working with
just giving them that one focus around a plan for them.
We've seen the benefit of health and social care working together,
removing organisational boundaries so that the service user, the patient,
isn't sitting there and wondering and worrying which pot of money things come from.
So for me when I've worked in mental health I've really seen the importance
of bringing together a number of different roles and functions
that wrap themselves around an individual at the times when they need it most.
So you could be talking about an individual who wants to go to work,
has also got to be seen by their nurse for medication,
but is having problems with housing so needs the input from a social worker,
and integrated working is when you can have that whole multidisciplinary team
working collectively to support that individual and it hides the wiring.
It's got to be a roots-up process.
Many a good strategy has sat on a shelf and it doesn't matter how good it is,
if your frontline staff don't buy into it and believe it, because they're the ones,
not managers, not senior staff, it's the people on the ground
who are going to make this system work.
Most often it is the integration of health workers and social care workers in a team,
everyone joining the same organisation, integrated IT systems, integrated policies,
procedures, the important aspect is why you're integrating it.
It's coming together to provide a better, more cohesive service
for the people that you're there to serve.
Integrated working is about working with a group of different colleagues
with different skills, and making sure that you don't overlap
with what they do but you enhance each other's work.
So the service that you provide to the service user is therefore a whole lot better,
because they're not having to constantly repeat themselves,
and they're not having to have several assessments to get a service.
And then the whole group of people communicates the information
in order to provide better outcomes for people using services.
I've had the benefit and the luxury of working within integrated teams for many, many years,
in that, mental health teams, community mental health teams are,
if you like, the quintessential integrated team, we have doctors, nurses,
occupational therapists and social workers all working together,
usually co-located, managed together.
It's about people coming from different areas, different organisations
and providing a seamless service for the patient, and the patient shouldn't be able
to really discern that we're coming from different organisations.
So I was a carer from the age of nine for somebody who had schizophrenia
so I've spent my whole life caring for somebody.
People just want services they don't want health boards and wellbeing and clusters
they just want to know the GP's there when they need them you know
and they can have support.
He has a piece of equipment that he communicates with
and he clearly sees that as a social need because it's about him communicating.
Social Services can't fund and maintain that piece of equipment
and he's been referred to health and health are now looking into that
but it's taken a long time whereas what we hope in the future if you've got
integrated budgets we would look at one budget being allocated
to maintain that piece of equipment.