What is it about?
Integrated care is often perceived as a solution for some of the major challenges faced by health and social care. The ability to pool funds and resources to support integrated care is thought to be a key facilitator to this approach. This review investigated whether schemes designed to integrate health and social care funds do indeed support and incentivise integrated care in practice.
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Why is it important?
Health and social care systems across the developed world are under huge finanical pressures, and are struggling to cope with ever increasing demand. Policy makers appear confident that integrating finances and resources will resolve these pressures that will lead to integrated care services. Our work finds that pooling funds across health and social care services is not a panacea in this regard.
Perspectives
Pooling budgets should be a major facilitator for supporting integrated care but the practical, cultural and technical difficulties involved in implementing have proven to be a major barrier for many schemes to date. This does not mean that future success is unattainable, but that expectations should be realistic and that new schemes need to be rolled out cautiously.
Mrs Anne Mason
University of York
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Integrating funds for health and social care: an evidence review, Journal of Health Services Research & Policy, January 2015, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1355819614566832.
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