care integration – from “one size fits all” to person centred care; comment on “achieving integrated care for older people: shuffling the deckchairs or making the system watertight for the future?”

Integrating services is a hot topic amongst health system policy-makers and healthcare managers. there is some evidence that integrated services deliver efficiencies and reduce service utilisation rates for some patient populations. in their article on achieving integrated care for older people, gillian harvey and her colleagues formulate some critical insights from practice and research around integrated care. however, the real challenge is to reconcile service integration with patient experiences. this paper argues that unless we think service integration from the patient’s perspective we will continue to fail to produce the evidence we need to support integrated care solutions to the current health system challenges.