Professionals’ views on integrated care
Abstract
Purpose
Integrated care policies have been at the heart of recent health reforms in many European countries. The purpose of this paper is to study the integration from the perspective of health care personnel working in primary health care clinics.
Design/methodology/approach
The study employs data from interviews collected in a research project examining patient choice and integrated care in primary health care clinics in Finland. The interviews were conducted in five cities in Southern Finland in 17 primary health care clinics in Autumn 2014. Among the interviewees there were both doctors (n=32) and nurses (n=31).
Findings
The typical problems hindering integration were, according to the workers, poor communication and insufficient information exchange between professionals, unclear definition of responsibilities between professionals, and lacking contacts and information exchange between health and social care professionals. To secure availability and continuity of care, doctors and nurses did extra work and exceeded their duties or invented ad hoc solutions to solve the problem at hand. According to professionals, patients were forced to take an active role as coordinator of their own care when responsibilities were not clearly defined between professionals.
Originality/value
This paper highlights that successful integration requires taking into account the requirements of the day-to-day work of health care clinics, and clarifying what facilitates and what hinders practical collaboration between different actors in health care and between health care and other service providers.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The research was conducted in Client-centred Primary Health Care – Patient Choice And Care Integration-Project (No. 40291) funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes), and Competent Workforce for the Future-Project (No. 303605) funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC) at the Academy of Finland.
Citation
Jolanki, O., Tynkkynen, L.-K. and Sinervo, T. (2017), "Professionals’ views on integrated care", Journal of Integrated Care, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 247-255. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICA-06-2017-0018
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited