Past Event

About the Speaker

Dr Caroline Potter

Caroline Potter is a Research Officer at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, in the Health Services Research Unit. Prior to joining HSRU in 2014 Caroline was a lecturer in medical anthropology within Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, where she had completed her masters’ and doctoral research following a first degree in chemical engineering at the University of South Carolina. As a medical anthropologist Caroline has broad expertise on how people maintain health and cope with illness in different cultural settings around the world. Her previous research focused on the UK, for example examining the emergence of obesity within the British population through analysis of data from the National Child Development Study (1958 British birth cohort).

Abstract

Integrated Care Systems are the latest in a series of initiatives within the UK health and care landscape to make services more joined-up, efficient and effective. They emerged out of the recognition that ageing populations increasingly require care for multiple long-term conditions over years or decades, rather than the short-term treatments for acute illness for which the NHS was originally designed. Building on earlier work such as the House of Care model, a strong discourse in support of integrated care (and related initiatives such as social prescribing) has emerged from policy makers and health think tanks in recent years. But there remain notable gaps in knowledge about what ‘good integrated care’ looks like and how it functions to improve the experiences of patients or the health of populations. After outlining the complexity of the current health and social care landscape within the UK, I will consider what broad goals the proponents of integrated care aim to achieve, and what resources might be available for achieving them. As an example I will present the development of the Long-Term Conditions Questionnaire (LTCQ), a patient-reported outcome measure designed to capture what ‘living well’ means across a broad range of conceptual domains (e.g. autonomy, safety, social connectedness and support), with potential application in a variety of care settings. My current work exploring use of the LTCQ among memory clinic patients and their carers provides a focus for exploring how people with complex care needs navigate their health and care landscapes, and how those landscapes might become more legible through a person-centred approach to integrated care.    

 

 

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