Fonds Dr. Daniël De Coninck : Transnational Forum on Integrated Community Care

Integrated community care (ICC) engages people and communities as co-producers of care. It implies a shift in traditional thinking based on problem-based, disease-oriented care to a goal-oriented, person-centred care aiming at enhancing the quality of life of vulnerable individuals and improving population health amongst communities.

lntegrated Community Care acknowledges that communities are essential partners that contribute invaluable assets: relationships, expertise, contextual knowledge, entrepreneurship, public space and services, and locally supportive ecosystems. ICC is not a prescriptive model, or a managerial toolbox, but a systemic approach to enhancing the quality of life, social cohesion and resilience of a territorially defined community. The systemic nature of ICC embodies several elements:

• ICC envisions a paradigm shift in the way health and care systems are organised. The key difference is the move beyond ‘delivery’ to genuine ‘co-development’ with the individuals and communities that are traditionally seen as recipients.
• ICC emphatically addresses the broader determinants of health through evidence-informed policies and actions across all sectors.
• ICC encapsulates a set of generative principles that wholly or partially manifest themselves in a relatively wide range of models and practices. These practices may reflect an ambition to improve health, to enhance community resilience, to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods, or any combination thereof.
• ICC pivots on greater integration between primary care, public health functions, social work, neighbourhood development and specialised care within a given territory. Network governance is a crucial competence to continuously form new constellations of service providers that can respond to changing and spa­tially differentiated needs.
• ICC comes down to a continuous process of ‘whole system innovation’. Distributed power and collective learning are the cornerstones of this comprehensive perspective on health and care.

7 principles of Integrated Community Care

We spoke with experts from the field to hear about what Integrated Community Care meant to them and how they see it operationalised in their communities and through their work. Check the video on what ICC means for them.

About TransForm

TransForm, the Transnational Forum on Integrated Community Care. TransForm is a joint initiative of Foundations in Europe and Canada. The overarching aim of the Forum is to mobilize change at policy and practice levels by engaging policymakers, practitioners, and key stakeholders, in knowledge generation, and the sharing of promising and best practices. The TransForm partnership is hosted by the Network of European Foundations and comprises: Compagnia di San Paolo (IT); Robert Bosch Stiftung (DE); Fondation de France (FR); Fund Dr. Daniël De Coninck and the King Baudouin Foundation (BE); Graham Boeckh Foundation, and the Conconi Foundation (Canada). The International Foundation for Integrated Care provides content and management support to the project.

TransForm partners are convinced of the value of investing time, resources and imagination to enhance the capacity of local communities to deal with public health issues and the care needs of community members throughout their whole lifetime.

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