As part of major policy reforms begun in 2010, England introduced a wave of initiatives to encourage more integrated care between health and social care. These built on previous attempts which sought to achieve similar objectives through a focus on better partnership working. This article provides an overview and critical commentary on integrated care policy in England from 2010–2020 based on reviews by regulators, parliamentary committees and the national audit office. Integrated care became a priority through the work of the Future Forum, a group of leading stakeholders established due to concerns about greater competition in public health care. This led to a public statement of shared commitment to integrated care by national health and social care bodies. Early mechanisms included a pooled fund to achieve nationally set objectives, the creation of local authority led partnership boards, and high profile innovation programmes. Later in the 2010’s, new health led partnerships became more dominant vehicles to achieve integrated care at regional level. Despite progress within a few local areas, and reduction in delayed discharges from hospital the overall picture from national reviews was that expected improvements were not achieved. Emergency admissions to hospital continued to grow, patients within primary care reported being less involved in their care, and health inequalities worsened. The initial response to COVID-19 was health-centric contributing to outbreaks in care homes and inadequate supplies of protective personal equipment. The ability of leaders to look beyond their organisations’ interests was reported as vital for local progress. National government performance frameworks discouraged system based working and chronic underfunding of social care led to major capacity and workforce challenges. The experience of England suggests that greatest progress is made when integrated care focusses on tangible issues and when there is a clear understanding of how success will be measured. Even with considerable investment and intent progress should be expected to be slow and difficult. Layering of numerous policy initiatives provides confusion and can distract from the important work of relationship building. And ultimately, integrated care cannot by itself address major inadequacies in the underlying resources and structural inequalities.

Joint working between health and social care has long been a policy priority in England, with growing interest by the previous New Labour government in achieving 'joined-up solutions to joined-up problems'. Against this background, this paper reviews lessons from current and previous partnership initiatives, summarising some of the key approaches adopted and exploring key underlying concepts and frameworks. Despite a tendency to focus on structural 'solutions', evidence and experience suggests a series of more important processes, approaches and concepts that might help to promote more effective inter-agency working-including a focus on outcomes, consideration of the depth and breadth of relationship required and the need to work together on different levels.

Inter-professional education (IPE) can support professionals in developing their ability to work collaboratively. This position paper from the European Forum for Primary Care considers the design and implementation of IPE within primary care. This paper is based on workshops and is an evidence review of good practice. Enablers of IPE programmes are involving patients in the design and delivery, providing a holistic focus, focussing on practical actions, deploying multi-modal learning formats and activities, including more than two professions, evaluating formative and summative aspects, and encouraging team-based working. Guidance for the successful implementation of IPE is set out with examples from qualifying and continuing professional development programmes.

Social enterprises have been actively encouraged to spin out of the National Health Service (NHS) on the grounds that they can deliver more innovative, cost-efficient and responsive services. This is arguably achieved through a combination of the best of the public, third and private sectors. This article explores this idea by bringing together empirical data from interviews with NHS spin-outs and a framework of ‘publicness’. By focusing on NHS spin-outs, we look at what happens to an organization’s publicness when it leaves the public sector yet continues to deliver publicly funded services.

The importance of management to the implementation of integrated care is recognised in evidence and practice. Despite this recognition, there is a lack of clarity about what 'good' management of integrated care looks like, if the competences are different to management for 'traditional' care, and how such competences can be acquired. This exploratory study is based on qualitative interviews with participants with extensive experience of implementing integrated care in senior professional, research, administrative and/or policy roles. It conceptualises management as working at 'strategic' and 'operational' levels. Management of integrated care was seen to require an ability to create networks across professions and organisations, to be comfortable with distributing responsibilities, and to thoroughly understand the wider system. Competences to support these new ways of working included an understanding of how to implement people-centredness, to have courage to challenge the status quo, and to demonstrate humility to learn from others. Structured development opportunities for managers were lacking, but seen as vital for the sustainability of change. Management for integrated care remains an underdeveloped concept and practice. A first formulation of the competences necessary was achieved, but more work is urgently required to understand how to better prepare and support managers to achieve necessary changes in practice and culture.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on research evidence and practice experience of transforming primary care to a more integrated and holistic model. Design/methodology/approach: It is based on a scoping review which has been guided by primary care stakeholders and synthesises research evidence and practice experience from ten international case studies. Findings: Adopting an inter-professional, community-orientated and population-based primary care model requires a fundamental transformation of thinking about professional roles, relationships and responsibilities. Team-based approaches can replicate existing power dynamics unless medical clinicians are willing to embrace less authoritarian leadership styles. Engagement of patients and communities is often limited due to a lack of capacity and belief that will make an impact. Internal (relationships, cultures, experience of improvement) and external (incentives, policy intentions, community pressure) contexts can encourage or derail transformation efforts. Practical implications: Transformation requires a co-ordinated programme that incorporates the following elements – external facilitation of change; developing clinical and non-clinical leaders; learning through training and reflection; engaging community and professional stakeholders; transitional funding; and formative and summative evaluation. Originality/value: This paper combines research evidence and international practice experience to guide future programmes to transform primary care.