Laura Thompson: The human cost of disjointed care and the opportunity for neighbourhood pioneers
We have all been discussing integrated care for a long time. We have the policy intent from government and everyone agrees it’s the right thing to do. And yet, for too many patients, the experience on the ground still feels anything but joined up.
Start with people, not systems
At The Access Group we feel strongly about the importance of grounding conversations about integrated care in real human experience.
It’s easy, in rooms full of technologists and system architects, to talk about interoperability and data flows and platform architecture. These factors matter, of course, but they are not the end point. Nor should they be the beginning.
The end point is the person who has navigated mental and/or physical health services since childhood, like Debs Teale – known for The Debs Effect – who will be joining me on stage at Rewired. Our start point should be the problems we’re trying to solve and obstacles we’re trying to overcome.
It’s this person who has repeated their story to every new health or care team, every new service provider, every ‘new’ touchpoint with the NHS who feels the weight of a system that was never designed to see them as a whole person.
Can we afford to have any more stories like that in the system?
The Neighbourhood Health Programme represents a genuine shift in how England thinks about delivering care, moving away from institutional, condition-specific models towards place-based, population-level support that wraps around people where they live.
The critical question now is – what does it actually take to get there?
In our experience, the providers making the most progress share a few factors in common. They have invested in the basics – shared data infrastructure, consistent identifiers, and agreed information governance. They are using interoperable solutions anchored around the patient journey, rather than the provider structure.
And they have resisted the temptation to treat technology as a shortcut to integration, understanding instead that it is an enabler of the human relationships and workflows that make integration real.
Importance of the voluntary sector
Similarly, genuinely integrated care means recognising that the NHS and social care don’t hold all the relationships that matter. For many people – particularly those managing long-term conditions or navigating complex needs – voluntary and community organisations are their most trusted and common point of contact.
Any neighbourhood health model that doesn’t build meaningfully with the third sector isn’t going to be successful. This includes data sharing, shared care planning, and a technology architecture that includes the voluntary sector rather than treating it as peripheral part of the constellation of care.
At Rewired, we’ll be tackling these issues head on.
I’ll be joined by Debs Teale who will be sharing her lived experience as a recipient of mental health services since the age of eight and the extensive challenges she’s faced navigating the NHS over five decades.
Together, we’ll discuss the lessons learned from her experiences and the significance of digital in mitigating the failings she’s felt as a patient, Plus how neighbourhood health pioneers should use these lessons as they take on the responsibility of truly integrating services across acute, mental health and community, social and primary care.
We will also be joined by Dr Minal Bakhai MBE (Director for Primary Care & Community Transformation & the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Prog, NHS England) and Colette Marshall, CEO, Diabetes UK. Both will bring critical perspectives to this discussion, and together, our session combines policy, patient, partner and providers views on using tech to make integrated care really work.
Laura Thompson, Marketing Director, The Access Group
