Strengthening a competent health workforce for the provision of coordinated/ integrated health services

• Published in: International journal of integrated care 2016-12, Vol.16 (6), p.231
• Main Authors: Langins, Margrieta, Borgermans, Liesbeth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accountability; Health services; Integrated delivery systems; Medical personnel; Professionals; Workforce
• ISSN: 1568-4156; 1568-4156
• DOI: 10.5334/ijic.2779

Finding more efficient, innovative and responsive ways of engaging the health workforce to manage patients is key to ensuring integrated care. Systems that are transforming their services to be more integrated must ensure that health professionals are ready to fill the new roles assigned to them in prevention and pro-active patient management, manage health and care rather than disease and cure, work in teams across professions and sectors, work along a continuum of care, protect and advocate the most vulnerable, ensure equitable service delivery, optimize communication that has an emphasis on compassion and empathy and develop more than one vertical expertise.Securing a health workforce that “wants and feels” and has the theoretical knowledge and skills to work more efficiently and effectively is not enough in ensuring integrated health services. What is needed is a guarantee that health professionals who enter the workplace will apply their knowledge and skills with sound judgment (i.e. that they will have competencies) and that they will refine and maintain these over the course of their career (consolidate competencies). To date the focus on competencies has been limited to looking at education institutions (i.e. college and universities) where initial exposure to competencies takes place. Indeed important strides have been taken since the Lancet review on transforming health professional education to be more competency-oriented. The lack of a clear definition on what competencies are, how they are governed and strengthened beyond initial training settings has however resulted in misplacing competencies of the health workforce as merely a problem for training institutions. Without a deeper exploration into what competencies are and how they can be strengthened at both the service and systems level important conversations on the relevance of competencies to health systems have been missed. This has been explored in our paper for the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe "Strengthening a competent health workforce for the provision of coordinated/ integrated health services" (http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Health-systems/health-service-delivery/publications/2015/strengthening-a-competent-health-workforce-for-the-provision-of-coordinated-integrated-health-services).A systematic review of the literature was conducted resulting in the identification of 5 core competencies for integrated care. Their consolidation over the course of a