04.07.13
Leadership most important factor if integrated care to succeed
Integration still faces considerable barriers, including organisational culture, payment mechanisms and data, new evidence shows.
ADASS (the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services) and the NHS Confederation polled adult social care directors and local health service commissioners to identify the biggest challenges to greater integration.
Of those polled, 80% said strong leadership was the most important for integration, and 64% said that problems with data and IT were hampering the development of integrated services.
Over half reported that delayed discharges had been delayed in situations where integration was in place and two out of five had seen a positive impact in unplanned emergency hospital admissions. More service users were still at home three months after discharge from hospital where services were integrated.
ADASS president Sandie Keene said: “This early evidence of closer work with the health service is entirely welcome. As it develops it will have a growing positive impact in accelerating the changes we are making and acknowledging the role of social care in the delivery of effective health services, particularly for those people with long term conditions.
“We should be mindful of the need to overcome the obstacles in the way, such as the lack of IT coherence between different agencies. We must also be aware of the important role strong local leadership can play in overcoming the challenges that integration poses. Overall the survey contains encouraging and positive early signs that the move towards integration is gathering pace and support where it matters most – in localities and across all levels of care staff.”
NHS Confederation director of policy Dr Johnny Marshall said: “With everything going on in health and social care services over the past few months, there was a risk local leaders could have adopted a 'hunker down' mentality. What snapshot surveys like this demonstrate is the resilience which clinicians, practitioners and managers possess in order to continue to focus on patients and service users.
“The drive to develop integrated services around users transcends organisational upheaval and the day-to-day difficulties of mismatched inherited computer systems. The job now for health and care leaders is to make sure we address residual barriers so the passion of our staff to integrate care around individuals is allowed to flourish.”
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