Background
The National Clinical Programme for Older People (NCPOP) aims to improve and standardise the quality of health and social care for older people in Ireland by supporting the provision of services across all settings. This is in line with a policy agenda of integration of health and social care which seeks to shift the focus of service delivery from acute to community. The Integrated Care Programme for Older People (ICPOP) aims to support older people to live well in their homes by providing secondary care in the community. It is establishing integrated intermediate care which traverses hospital and community care in the form of interdisciplinary and interagency teams. This team based approach to the integration of health services is a novel innovation in Irish health service delivery and will require over time a shift in cultures of care to allow for the fostering of competencies for inter-professional collaboration across the care continuum.
The ECLECTIC project will evaluate Collective Leadership as a method of developing and implementing competencies for inter-professional collaborative working in health and social care teams providing services to older people.
Design
The ECLECTIC research design has been developed in collaboration with the NCPOP. Six Collective Leadership interventions will be implemented over a 10 month period in two interdisciplinary teams delivering care to older people. Using co-designed data collection material, observations of collaborative inter-professional working will take place before, during and after intervention implementation. Analysis of the interview and observation data will be presented to the co-design team in order to develop an implementation framework.
Impact
The implementation framework will model core competencies and performance indicators for collaborative inter-professional working. The framework will provide guidance for achieving, maintaining and monitoring these competencies and will be implemented nationally as part of the Integrated Care Programme for Older People.
