Integrated Care and Community Partnerships (ICCPs) offer a promising architecture for bringing care and community partners together. This key architure can be used to innovate equitable access solutions that advance the social health of older adults who live with complex health conditions (CHCs).
A mixed-methods evaluation was conducted to describe and evaluate the impact of a gardening workshop series that was supported by an ICCP. The study incorporates data from descriptive, administrative, quantitative and qualitative sources.
The study provides important information that can be used by care organizations to initiate and implement ICCPs. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of mitigating inequitable access barriers to non-care social and recreational opportunities, particularly for older people living with complex health conditions.
It is anticipated that the findings will be of interest to health authorities, policymakers and health administrators around the world who are interested in the design and implementation of ICCPs that focus on the social health of older people who live with CHCs, and potentially other at-risk populations.
Further studies are required to further evaluate the feasibility, effectiveness and scalability of ICCPs to render equitable access solutions with the capacity to enhance the social health of older adults with CHCs and other at-risk populations.
The initiative’s short duration and the clinical profiles of the participants limited the ability to employ a comprehensive set of quantitative measures to assess changes in overall health. Where possible, future evaluations of similar projects should use broader outcome measures to attempt to capture more fully the range of potential benefits (social, health, mental health, service-level e.g. healthcare usage, referrals) for these interventions.
The paper describes the process of establishing the partnership, the ICCP model intervention and evaluation findings. The broader implications of employing ICCPs as a strategic means for advancing holistic population health and realizing health resource efficiencies, are analyzed and discussed.
