To innovate healthcare and improve the patient’s journey, more integrated care systems are essential. A range of opportunities is available to AER members in the context of the Scirocco Exchange project on integrated care, as the AER Project workshop showed on the occasion of the AER Committees Spring 2019 Plenaries in Örebro.

The patient at the centre

The objective of integrated care systems is to provide health and social care in a flexible, personalised, and seamless way.

The integration of care can be

• vertical, involving patient pathways to treat named medical conditions that transcend organisational boundaries and connect community-based generalists with largely hospital-sited specialists

or

• horizontal, involving peerbased and cross-sectoral collaboration to improve overall health closing the traditional gap that often exists between health and social care or vertical, ensuring better.

The objective is to bridge delivery, management, and organisational gaps. An integrated e-care approach harmonizes and coordinates the management, organization, and delivery of services. This ensures healthcare services provide quality and efficient solutions to the needs of patients.

Peer learning to scale up

Despite the vast amount of literature and experiences on the topic, the deployment of integrated care systems is often still a bumpy road. Peer learning is therefore at the heart of the Scirocco Exchange project.

This project, of which AER is a proud partner, builds on the outputs of the very successful Scirocco project, which brought together Scotland, Norrbotten, Puglia, Olomouc and the Basque Country to assess strengths and weaknesses, facilitate multi-stakeholder dialogues and transfer good practices via twinning and coaching.

The key to the deployment of complex changes is peer learning. But peer learning rarely happens spontaneously, it needs to be encouraged and facilitated. With its almost 35 years experience in mutual learning and good practice transfer, AER was the ideal partner for this task. AER will therefore facilitate the transfer of knowledge in Scirocco Exchange.

Scirocco Exchange will:

• Maximise the use and improve access to existing knowledge and evidence in order to increase the capacity of regions to implement integrated care

• Determine precisely how to improve capacity of regions to redesign and improve their healthcare systems in order to speed up the adoption and scaling-up of integrated care

• Tailor the capacity-building support and improvement planning to local needs and priorities in health and social care management hub

What’s in for AER members?

First of all, the SCIROCCO tool for integrated care:

Regions working on innovative solutions that support the delivery of integrated health and care can use the SCIROCCO online self-assessment tool. This tool was tested in 60 regions and organisations in Europe and beyond, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, and the US. The Scirocco self-assessment tool is used to identify the maturity of the health and social care systems for the adoption and scaling up of integrated care solutions.

• This online self-assessment can be used by stakeholders, be it at the level of a hospital, a city or a region
• The outcomes of this process help to inform stakeholders involved about the readiness of their local environments for integrated careand identify priority areas for action.
• The SCIROCCO tool was also tested with multidisciplinary teams to capture the perceptions of all stakeholders involved in integrated care.
• This participatory tool facilitates the discussions and negotiations within the teams in order to reach consensus and agreements on the maturity of the environment for integrated care.

The Scirocco online self-assessment tool for integrated care is presented and explained on the Scirocco website, a set of set of videos and a tutorial explain how to use it.
Note: Because local stakeholders aren’t necessarily fluent in English, the tool was translated to Italian, Spanish and Czech and is being translated in Slovak, Slovenian, Lithuanian and Polish.

Second, the Scirocco Knowledge Management Hub:

AER member regions which have already implemented successful practices in the field of integrated care can share expertise with other regions in the world via the Scirocco Knowledge Management Hub and test the hub to improve it. This Knowledge Management Hub is being developed to maximise the use and improve access to existing knowledge and evidence. (No, not yet another repository with difficult to find information). this hub will help regions find relevant resources depending on their own needs. Interestingly this hub will also be used by fellow projects financed by the European Union’s 3rd Health Programme.

• Regions can share expertise for the Knowledge management Hub: tools, guidelines, good practices
• Regions can identify experts who could contribute to the different knowledge transfer activities, in training webinars, study visits, mentorship, etc
• Regions can identify experts who would be able to advise for the elaboration of regional improvement plans
• Healthcare managers, national and regional authorities in charge of designing and commissioning healthcare services can test the Hub and help the consortium to improve it

The resources of the Knowledge Management Hub will be accessible to all and the more the Hub will be used, the better it will get.

Get in touch!

For more information on how to use the Scirocco self-assessment tool and how to contribute to the Scirocco Knowledge Management Hub, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Policy & Knowledge Transfer