Collaborating for Health

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.

Paul Thomas is a general practitioner in west London, professor of primary care research, education and development at the University of West London, UK, and honorary senior lecturer at Imperial College, UK. He is editor-in-chief of the London Journal of Primary Care, an international, Pubmed-cited journal that publishes case studies of integrated working in primary care and local communities.

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