Change Foundation President and CEO Cathy Fooks leads a discussion.
Fooks triggers dialogue about ‘integration’
Wednesday January 30, 2008 -- Natalie Miller
TORONTO — Cathy Fooks can provide 70 definitions of what the word integration means.

The question is what definition best describes the integration that is part of Ontario’s newly-structured health-care system.

“There is no common definition,” said Fooks, president and CEO of The Change Foundation.

Fooks led a session called ‘The Integration Journey: Road Trips from Afar’ at the Ontario Hospital Association’s ‘LHIN and the New Government’ session Jan. 25. About 160 people with an interest in health care attended the event.

To help define integration, The Change Foundation is conducting research and organizing patient focus groups to gather knowledge about the patient’s transition through the current health-care system from acute care to home or to long-term care.

Fooks shared a few definitions of integration that arose from initial research.

In 2006, The Canadian Council of Health Services Accreditation defined integration as “services, providers and organizations from across the continuum working together so that services are complementary, co-ordinated, in a seamless unified system, with continuity for the client.”

Meanwhile, that same year, the Health Results Team for Information Management defined integration as “an integrated health system would result in co-ordinated health services that both improve accessibility and allow people to move more easily through the care and treatment continuum of the health system and provide appropriate, effective and efficient health services.”

In Ontario, Fooks said the 2006 Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s LHIN team’s definition of integration is broad and encompasses “the process of effectively managing the alignment of multiple systems of independent (and interdependent) organizations with unique goals and objectives to achieve three important outcomes that are central to the Ministry’s transformation agenda.

They are: “ensuring that users experience service as seamless, where boundaries between organizations are not apparent to them, improving the match between single services provided and the multiple needs of clients and families and enabling effective and efficient use of system resources and capacity by optimizing system interactions across the system and across program silos.”

There are 67 other definitions.

Through The Change Foundation’s research, which has extended across Canada and abroad, Fooks said while each healthcare model has its unique set of circumstances, “the need to integrate delivery in a more organized fashion was common to all as one response to pressures.”

Fooks outlined 11 common elements across all jurisdictions that contribute to making integration successful.

— More to come