What is integrated care?

"Integrated care – leading partnerships to deliver seamless care anywhere."

Integrated Care involves the provision of seamless, effective, and efficient care that reflects the whole of a person's health needs:

• from prevention through to end of life,
• across both physical, psychosocial, and mental health and;
• in partnership with the individual, carers, and family members.

This includes state-wide strategies that coordinate and encourage better communication and connectivity between health care providers in primary care, community, and hospital settings, and provide better access to community-based services closer to home.

The vision for NSW Health is "A sustainable health system that delivers outcomes that matter to patients, is personalised, invests in wellness and is digitally enabled." 

Value Based Healthcare  is an over-arching approach to healthcare delivery and system design that will support NSW Health to achieve this vision.

In NSW, Value Based Healthcare (VBHC) means continually striving to deliver services that simultaneously improve the four essentials of value:

1. health outcomes that matter to patients
2. experience of receiving care
3. experience of providing care
4. effectiveness and efficiency of care

NSW Health is accelerating the move towards VBHC by piloting, scaling, and embedding state-wide initiatives and developing a range of system wide enablers. Integrated Care is one of four state-wide priority programs supporting the VBHC Framework . The other three are:

1. Leading Better Value Care
2. Commissioning for Better Value
3. Collaborative Commissioning

The NSW health system will face significant challenges in the coming decades as the effects of an ageing population and the growing prevalence of chronic and complex disease puts increased pressures on health care delivery. Integrated Care is a crucial step towards delivering care that is patient-centred, primarily provided in the community, and supported by primary care.

What are the benefits of integrated care?

Integrated Care provides benefits to the vulnerable in our community. These include:

• program enrolment and delivery of interventions for Health Coaching, Care Navigation and Care Coordination to improve health literacy, self-management, and health awareness,
• linking people into primary care and community service providers, who can assure continuity of care and;
• fostering patient independence by assisting them to manage their own health care and minimise their hospitalisations for as long as possible.

For more information about Integrated Care, contact the Ministry Integrated Care Implementation Team at: MOH-ConnectedCareandPartnerships@health.nsw.gov.au.