Facilitating cooperation through promotion of good practices
Authors: De Nutte Hilde , Van Den Heuvel Bernadette , De Vuyst Karen , Leenders Jo , Peeters Mathias , Viaene Mineke , Taerwe Timothy 
Published: January 2024

Zorgnet-Icuro vzw is in Belgium the umbrella organisation of the Flemish general hospitals, initiatives in mental healthcare and social profit facilities in long-term care for older people. Our care facilities aim to offer high-quality, affordable and accessible care.

Zorgnet-Icuro is the Flemish employers’ federation for healthcare, inclusing the care councils of the Flemish primary care zones and palliative care networks.  Furthermore, Zorgnet-Icuro functions as a network playing an active role in exchanging knowledge, ideas and good practices in healthcare.

Promoting, sensitising and facilitating concepts of integrated care is of one of our main objectives for the future.

 In the past we made several position papers and we have held stakeholdermeetings with our members about this subject.

The next step in our plan was to collect good practices about collaboration between different actors involved in an integrated care program.

We asked our members to give us the good practices based on the following criteria:

-How do you assess the added value of the collaboration for the person with a care and/or support request and the quality of the care provided?

-Collaboration between more than 2 different organisations or healthcareworkers

-Preferably a combination of health and welfare

-What is the aim of the collaboration?

-In which way did it had impact on the way of working of the different partners but also on  the needs of the people?

-Reduce fragmentation in services delivery through well-coordinated care  with focus on continuity of care.

Based on this feedback, we want to give concrete input to the authorities for the organisation and financing of integrated care.

In this workshop we first want to explain our vision and trajectory we have followed in the past years and give  an overview of these good practices of collaborations. (15 minutes)

Based on the criteria above we want to give the opportunity to 4 initiatives to show what they have done and go in interaction with an international public about the successfactors and the obstacles. For each presentation we provide a time slot of 10 -15 minutes, followed by discussion with the group in round tables.

The 4 projects are:

1.Welgerust: integrated care for people with sleep disorders

2.Pathway ‘addiction to drugs and alcohol’ based on deployment of  experience experts  throughout the whole chain of care with collaboration of hospital, city, welfare organisations and primary care. 

3.Verbindingscoach: a coach which helps the healthcare professionals and the people with healthcare problems related to  social factors (e.g. poverty) to reach the right welfare actor or organisation.

The bridge: In a exploratory short stay the health and well-being situation of the elderly person is observed and his social context is mapped out with all primary care and welfare actors involved, to search the best solution for this person and/or avoid hospital admission.

The take home messages will be a summary of the points of attention, obstacles and recommendations from the healthcare and welfare providers from the field.