Publish date: 21 May 2024
Staff from West London NHS Trust descended on Belfast to be part of international discussions on the future of integrated care.
The International Conference on Integrated Care was held in Northern Ireland and brought together more than a thousand clinicians, policymakers and researchers from around the world.
The theme this year was 'Taking the leap: making integrated care a reality for people and communities’, highlighting the importance of taking a patient-centred approach to improving health and care services.
As part of the conference, Trust staff gave presentations about developing an urgent community response single point of access and evaluated the success of Mental Health Integrated Network Teams (MINT), which are supporting patients as part of our Community and Recovery Mental Health Services (CARMHS)
Dr Christopher Hilton, Chief Operating Officer for Local and Specialist Services, said: "I have been to this conference and presented our work before, but it felt especially positive this year to be joined by colleagues representing the breadth of work West London NHS Trust undertakes across physical and community healthcare and addressing inequalities. Not only was it great to share our work, but we all came back from the intensive three days in Belfast – where health and care services are delivered through Integrated Care Boards - re-energised with ideas for further improving the care we provide”.
Dr Hilton gave a presentation describing the work led by the Trust on behalf of the North West London Community Collaborative to develop an Urgent Community Response Single Point of Access, to improve access to hospital alternatives from emergency services.
Dr Julia Renton and Sharon Thompson from the CARMHS team also led a workshop, with the support of virtual attendees Ade Omomo-Rashed and Dean Rigg, discussing three years of the Trust's MINT service and evaluating setbacks and successes.
It was great for participants to consider real-life examples of dilemmas of developing safe, high-quality and accessible services with constrained resources.
Dr Preston-Sowacki, a psychologist working as part of Ealing Community Partners, also gave a poster presentation on the diabetes psychology service, bridging the gap between physical and mental health issues associated with the illness.
There were also poster presentations about The Powering Recovery project to support service users out of touch with technology to access healthcare, and another which shone a light on the work of the Ealing Borough Based Partnership (BBP) to tackle health inequalities.
This year, West London NHS Trust was proud to be a 'knowledge partner' at the event, working alongside other organisations across the world championing the importance of integrated care.
