Need

• Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are partnerships that bring together health care, local government and other agencies to collectively manage planning services to improve health and reduce inequalities and ICSs are now a statutory requirement across England. While they focus at the systemic level, in order to embed this practice within the system, more local understanding is required about what Integrate Care really looks like.
• In 2019-2020, Affinity Health at Work developed an Integrated Care Competency Framework to describe integrated ways of working through reviewing existing evidence and focus groups with health and care professionals.
• Building on this initial framework, East London NHS Foundation Trust wanted to consolidate and test this framework further, using a larger and more diverse sample, to strengthen its evidence base and to aid its practical application at a local level.

Solution

• A rapid evidence review was conducted to identify and further evidence that had been produced since the development of the initial framework.
• An online survey was designed to allow for self-evaluation against the competency framework as well as peer assessment to provide wider feedback.
• Feedback reports were provided for individuals and teams.
• Statistical analysis was conducted to identify the most effective items to describe the competencies required for Integrated Care Working.

Outcome

• A final competency framework was developed, including 52 items across 8 competencies.
• The use of the framework to provide developmental feedback was explored, with the development of reports to achieve this at an individual and team level.
• There is further scope to improve the reliability of the framework through further refinement.
• The framework was positively associated to important job outcomes as those who displayed these behaviours perceived that they worked in a more integrated way, describe their work as meaningful, were more engaged at work, had higher job satisfaction and had more support from peers outside of their immediate team.
• For colleagues who worked with people who displayed more of these behaviours, their own engagement at work was also higher, showing wider benefits of integrated working.