‘Integration Made Possible’ in serial form. Celebrating 30 years of Interconnections
Interconnections – 1995 to 2025
One of the main purpose of Interconnections in the beginning was to promote multiagency keyworking as had been validated in the voluntary UK organisation ‘One Hundred Hours’. Keyworkers provide emotional and practical support to families and work to bring everyone around the new child together into a coherent and unified effort for development and learning. Such integration or joint working has been central to Interconnection’s international work in all of its thirty years.
To celebrate these three decades, the 2020 publication ‘Integration Made Possible: A practical Manual for joint working - multiagency, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary’ by Peter Limbrick is being serialised free for TAC Bulletin readers starting in January 2025. It discusses and guides integration around people of all ages, from nursery to old people’s home.
The following is extracted from the Introduction to the Manual:
The word ‘integration’ can be defined as unifying diverse elements into a whole - a process of joining things together with the purpose of achieving something better than was there when the things were separate. When various elements of support are integrated around a baby, child, teenager, adult or elderly person, a support system is created that is more whole. Support for people in need that is unified in this way is always better than a collection of fragments that do not fit well with each other, so we can think of integration as the antidote to harmful fragmentation. This Manual takes the widest possible interpretation of integration from joint working between the major local agencies to co-operation and collaboration at community level in such facilities as swimming pools and food banks...
Integration is a process rather than a one-off event requiring people to work together in some practical way. In this, people in need are not passive recipients of support. They are involved as fully as possible in all decisions about joint working. This is respectful and empowering and works towards the unified whole. Integration must include person-centred care and co-production and must have an evidence base. Included in both integration and co-production are, as appropriate, family members, carers, friends and neighbours...
The ideal to aspire to in integration is for each child or adult to experience a total pattern of support that is sensibly organised, harmonious, effective, empowering and apparently seamless without them having to be always conscious of the various agencies, practitioners and other people that have come together to create it. It is possible to achieve the ideal, but in most cases, the level of integration will be the best that can be achieved at the time in the particular situation. Once a degree of integration is achieved and shown to be successful it will surely expand its scope and attract more people into the culture of joint working...
Returning to the definition I started with, we can characterise the process of integration as always working towards wholeness. Firstly, there is respectful recognition of the person in need as a whole adult or child. Then there is the wholeness of their condition and situation made up of many interconnected elements. Next, there is the aspiration to wholeness of their intervention system in which practitioners and other people around them connect with each other to create a whole approach...
Contents (The Introduction is followed by 6 sections with 21 topics)
1: All about integration
- Types of integration
- Problems caused by fragmentation
- When integration is needed
- Integration that occurs spontaneously
2: Benefits of integration
- Benefits to service users
- Benefits to family, carers and friends
- Benefits to service providers
3: Common approaches to integration
- Co-location and one-stop shops
- Keyworking
- Individualised multidisciplinary teams
- Primary interventionists
- Integrated pathways
- Directories and communication systems
4: Considerations in promoting integration
- Partnership with service users
- Surveys
- Horizontal teamwork
- Attitudes to integration
5: Wider integration
- Integration with the private sector
- Integration as a cultural phenomenon
- Academic responsibilities in integration
6: First moves to promote integration
- Tasks for leaders
If you have some reason for seeing the whole Manual quickly, please contact Peter Limbrick –
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