Health and Social Care Integration

Integration is defined as a collection of techniques and organisational models designed to create connections and collaboration within and between the health and social sectors. These techniques may relate to funding, administrative organisation and care. Unlike coordination among organisations, which seeks to manage the fragmentation inherent in the system as much as possible, integration seeks to reduce the fragmentation of the system by reorganising it.

Key points

There is no single integration model. However, there are commonalities:

• concertation organised at all levels: the macro level to standardise public policies, the meso level to locally organise health, medical social and social services, and the micro level for the delivery of integrated care by multidisciplinary teams;
• facilitation by a leader recognised as legitimate by all the participants and institutions in the region;
• changes in the operation of organisations and procedures for collaboration among participants.

The aim of this document is to present the concept of integration of health and social care so as to be useful to the French context.