Developing an experience-based toolkit to progress a population health approach in support of integrated care and better population health outcomes

Background: Ireland’s healthcare policy Sláintecare puts a population-based approach to integrated care at the centre of health planning and delivery in response to population health trends, health inequalities and the health system reform agenda to deliver integrated care.

Nonetheless, there was no nationally agreed population health approach to deliver on these policy goals and to address this gap the 'All Together for Population Health' project developed a co-designed and evidence-based definition and principles for a population health approach for Ireland.

The outputs of this project will guide policy and programme implementation but now need to be complemented with a suite of practical tools that can enable people across the health, care and broader population health ecosystem to meaningfully deliver on population health goals.

Audience: This workshop will be of interest to those working at various system levels and across domains to implement strategies, programmes and interventions aimed at improving services, integrated care delivery and population health outcomes through a targeted population-based approach.

Approach: We will share the methodology underpinning the 'All Together for Population Health' project in Ireland as a starting point, workshopping with others from across the IFIC/ICIC community internationally what implementation frameworks and tools are working well in different contexts, highlighting the opportunities and barriers to success, and finally consolidating shared learnings and exploring how to support workforce preparedness to deliver on population health goals.

The workshop will begin with a short introduction to the 'All Together for Population Health' project in Ireland through which a co-designed definition and set of principles for an agreed population health approach have been developed. The focus of the introduction will principally be on the engagement and co-design methodology used to stage a workshop-format exploration of how linked population-based integrated care and specific population health interventions and programmes are operationalised in different national or regional contexts.

The second stage of the workshop will be a table-based discussion in groups during which participants brainstorm relevant tools and mechanisms in use in their local contexts - grouping these using an 'amber, red, green' evaluative measure and being ready to share their results in plenary.

The third workshop stage is a plenary in which commonalities, variances etc across categorised tools will be described and shared to explore if or why some tools worked well in some contexts (green), whilst other did not (red). Tools categorised in the 'amber' category will be further discussed to explore what makes certain approaches effective, and to what degree.

The final stage of this workshop will explore how the tools identified can be made accessible to different workforces and stakeholders for example through training, induction, peer learning etc.

Anticipated Learnings and Outcomes: Participants can expect a practical session which identifies and evaluates the effectiveness of different tools in use to implement population-based integrated care in different contexts; they will learn how different workforces and stakeholders are supported for implementation; and finally understand the methodology used to progress population-based integrated care in Ireland through the 'All Together for Population Health' project.