A delegation of the SUSTAIN consortium presented the SUSTAIN project at ICIC 2017 in Dublin. Focus of the presentation was “What have we learned so far and how to move forward?
Event Report – SUSTAIN at the International Conference on Integrated Care 2017 in Dublin
Published: 5th June 2017
Earlier this month, a delegation of the SUSTAIN consortium presented the SUSTAIN project at ICIC 2017 in Dublin. Focus of the presentation was “What have we learned so far and how to move forward?”. The session was divided in four parts:
- Current status of the SUSTAIN project and experiences of one of the Catalan integrated care sites participating in SUSTAIN; a site that is making good progress (Simone de Bruin, RIVM);
- Experiences of one of the Dutch sites; a site that experienced some challenges (Nick Zonneveld, Vilans);
- Overall methodological approach and methodological challenges (Jenny Billings, UniKent);
- Development process of the roadmap to the improvement of existing integrated care initiatives; one of the key deliverables of SUSTAIN (Nick Goodwin, IFIC).
Caroline Baan (RIVM) chaired the session and facilitated the discussion around three central questions: 1. Does the audience recognize the challenges that we have faced, and how did they overcome these; 2. If the audience would be evaluating these kind of improvements as in the SUSTAIN project, what would they do and what kind of information would they need; 3. What key information would the audience like to include in a roadmap that both seeks to guide the design and implementation of integrated care?
We had interesting discussions in which it became clear that the audience recognized our challenges. We also received some valuable suggestions for the roadmap. We explained the au
dience that we aim to include the indicators that we are using in SUSTAIN in the roadmap. The audience advised us to include the indicators that we used and found useful in evaluating integrated care.
According to them, it would also be recommendable to include indicators that we came across when screening potential indicators for the SUSTAIN project but that we found not useful in this context. Including such indicators might prevent other researchers to go through similar screening processes of indicators as we have done. Another suggestion was that in the roadmap, we should give clear guidance to professionals, managers and policy-makers from health and social care organizations, as well as to policy-makers from the government. Information should be tailored to the different stakeholders’ preferences and needs.