Integrated Care: Reflections on Change in Health Services

by Axel Kaehne

Overview

Over the last twenty years integrated care has been touted as a solution to many issues in health services, such as insufficient coordination between services, cumbersome organizational boundaries, interrupted patient journeys, as well as spiraling health care costs. However, despite volumes of research, the field has seen few innovative advances in recent years. In particular, prevailing integrated care implementation practice and research appear to be very health science centred, spurning approaches from other disciplines.

Axel Kaehne argues that it is time to re-evaluate how we investigate care integration. He asks us to radically question our assumptions about integrated care as a managerial, organisational and behavioural endeavor. This is a profound departure from conventional thinking about integration in health and social care. Kaehne reveals the tacit assumptions we make when we manage and change health services and offers a fresh perspective on care integration whilst inviting readers to examine long established research orthodoxies. This eclectic conceptual and theoretical approach produces surprising insights for everyone who is ready to see things anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781801179799
Publisher:	Emerald Publishing Limited
Publication date:	04/15/2022
Series:	Emerald Points
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Axel Kaehne is a Reader for Health Services Research at the Medical School at Edge Hill Universityand Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Integrated Care (Emerald Publishing). He is also Visiting Professor at the Department of Health and Social Management at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio and currently President of EHMA, the European Health Management Association (Brussels).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction – why integrated care is so hard to achieve
Chapter 2. The Future of Integrated Care
Chapter 3. How organisation theory may help us understand integrated care
Chapter 4. Integrating care as organisational design
Chapter 5. Complexity in integration studies
Chapter 6. Care integration as a liminal moment
Chapter 7. Tacit assumptions in care integration
Chapter 8. The politics of integrating services
Chapter 9. Is integration a science or a craft?
Chapter 10. Reconciling the practice, research and reality of integrated care
Chapter 11. Integrated care as a research paradigm
Chapter 12. Patient centred care and integration