The inTouch Integrated Care Framework – Reimagining Integrated Health Service Delivery

Introduction: Integrated care has been adopted as a guiding principle to reduce fragmentation and to make health systems more person-centred. Successful integration requires care services and processes that include primary care, specialist care, and acute services. To promote learning and development in the field, flexible and adaptable empirically derived frameworks for different contexts, conditions and settings are required.

Description: The Western Sydney Local Health District (WSLHD) inTouch Program is a systems approach to reconceptualising service delivery, focusing on integrating systems components, platforms for service delivery and coordinating care planning for improved care delivery. The inTouch Program key features and core elements, and three care pathways are presented, demonstrating the adaptability for different population cohorts.

Discussion: The inTouch Program, and each pathway, embodies an ongoing, dynamic response to patient priorities. Informed by bottom-up stakeholder input from staff, consumers, and care providers, each pathway fosters interorganisational collaboration by facilitating coproduction of care across primary, aged, and community care sectors, as well as hospitals. The analysis derives an inTouch Integrated Care Framework consisting of six core elements, four strategy and governance enablers, and operational components required for practical implementation and sustainability of pathways. Together they operationalise and link diverse health and social care organisations into a living continuum of care.

Conclusion: Accounting for nuances in organisational and care settings, is the difference between success and failure for integrated care. The exploration of the inTouch program and three pathways has detailed how to deliver care for different patient cohorts across health and social care settings. The three care pathways demonstrate the viability and necessity to pursue collaboration, cooperation and care navigation, whilst tailoring services to specific contexts and stakeholder needs. inTouch program aims to ensure safe, high quality patient care is delivered across health and social settings, prioritising the patient needs.