The impact of integrated care teams on hospital use in North East Hampshire and Farnham

Patients with complex needs, long-term conditions, older age or frailty often receive fragmented care, delivered by multiple health professionals across different organisations. 

This can result in poorly coordinated care and risks to quality and safety. Integrated care aims to improve patient care and experience by enabling different health care professionals to work together to deliver more coordinated care, and providing services around the needs of the patient. Integrated care projects often aim to also reduce hospital admissions and associated health care costs of patients with complex long-term conditions. However, the integrated care projects that have been evaluated rigorously over the last decade or longer have had mixed results in this respect.

This report presents the findings from the Improvement Analytics Unit’s evaluation of integrated care teams (ICTs) implemented as part of the Happy, Healthy, at Home vanguard.