Integrated care pilots, announced as part of Health Minister Lord Darzi's Next Stage Review, may well prove to save money for the NHS. But that is not their principal aim, the NHS Alliance says.
Integrated care is about better, more effective services and improved patient experience.

That can only happen, though, if there is clarity about the essential requirements of integrated care, its objectives and appropriate performance measures.

But that clarity has to allow flexibility and local decisions about which of a number of possible models should be adopted in any particular locality.
Now the NHS Alliance has set out a proposed framework for the new ICO pilots. Along with goals such as clinical quality and financial accountability, it recommends:

- Patient and public participation at individual and collective levels so as to ensure patient satisfaction and to enhance patient engagement with health improvement measures

- Emphasis on prevention and reduction of ill health

- Collaboration across primary, community and secondary care boundaries, and across health and social care boundaries too

- A requirement that proposals should cover the whole disease spectrum, so as to avoid cherry picking

- Emphasis on clinical leadership so that clinician involvement from the start can ensure successful implementation.

NHS Alliance chairman Dr Michael Dixon said:

"This is what the NHS should be about. Providing seamless, patient centred care within a defined budget, with measurable clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction."

Integrated care: aiming high follows the recent NHS Alliance publication: Integrated healthcare: from aspiration to implementation. It is available from the NHS Alliance: adminnhsalliance.

Notes

1. The NHS Alliance is a collaboration of clinicians, managers and board members who put patients first. It is the independent body that represents NHS primary care. Values based, it is the only organisation that brings together PCTs with GP practices, clinicians with managers and Board members, and NHS primary care with its patients. The Alliance membership and its hard working national executive is fully multi-professional.

2. The Next Stage Review: our vision for primary and community care was published by the Department of Health 3rd July 2008. Integrated healthcare: from aspiration to implementation was published by the NHS Alliance 9th July 2008.

NHS Alliance