The 23rd International Conference on Integrated Care (ICIC23) took place in Antwerp on 22-24 May 2023 with the overarching theme ‘Care in action: how to work together, a participatory approach’. The conference brought together leaders, researchers, clinicians, managers, citizens, patients and caregivers from around the world to share their research and discuss topics ranging from change management implementation and collaboration to person-centred care and community engagement.
Caring neighbourhoods and compassionate communities
Closer involvement of communities was among the main themes driving the discussions.
Vilans Senior Researcher, Lian Stouthard shared her research in the Netherlands on how caring communities could become part of the health system of the future. During the session “Working with Community Partners”, she described the growing movement of citizens initiatives or ‘caring communities’ in Dutch neighbourhoods that fill the care gap and provide services in areas that are not support by the government. She presented findings from several research projects conducted by Vilans in collaboration with the Dutch umbrella organisation of citizens initiatives (NLZVE), including a survey to learn more about the impact of these initiatives and the challenges they face in collaborating with the Dutch care system.
Stouthard: “The results of this survey gave us insight in the activities, goals, partners and bottlenecks of these initiatives and initiated new participatory action research projects. These focused on reliable and sustainable financing for citizen initiatives, how initiatives measure their impact and how caring communities and ‘system parties’ work together.”
Innovative Supervision on Organisational Networks
The challenge of organising integrated care in collaborating care networks was highlighted by Vilans Senior Researcher, Dr. Sander Merkus during the workshop, “Innovative Supervision on Organisational Networks: finding the suitable scale.” Determining the suitable scale of such networks and how to organise supervision were identified as the main aspects of these challenges. Using a case study example, participants got to actively discuss and reflect on the importance of innovative network supervision and matters of scale in integrated care networks.
Merkus: “Contemporary arrangements and instruments for supervision are mostly aimed at individual organisations and not at an integrated network of organisations and the specific functioning of such a network. Supervision on a network as-a-whole instead of the individual participant, could make it more feasible for those participants to overcome their own specific interests in order to strive for the common interest of the network.”
More Vilans presentations at ICIC23
- Join IJIC’s journey back in time: the development of impact measurement & participation in research over the past 10 years. (Jessica Michgelsen)
- Digitising Integrated Care – aligning technology to values (Nick Zonneveld)
- Values mapping workshop: What are your integrated care values? (Nick Zonneveld)
- Change Management and Collaboration: factors for successful implementation