Integrated care in an international perspective: EUPHA proceedings December 2001.

The workshop of the EUPHA section Health Services Research took place on Thursday, December 8th, 2001 in Brussels at the annual conference of the EUPHA (European Public Health Association). The theme of the workshop was integrated care in an international perspective. Integrated care can be defined as a concept bringing together inputs, delivery, management and organisation of services related to diagnosis, treatment, care, rehabilitation and health promotion. The theme was chosen because of its relevance to European health care systems. In several European health systems, a development towards integrated care can be observed. Partly, this takes place under the banner of 'managed care' experiments (e.g. in Switzerland), in which case an American form of integrated care is imported and moulded into the own, national health care system. In other cases, however, the same type of development is named differently throughout European health care systems: e.g. 'shared care' (in Great Britain), or 'Vernetzung' (in Germany), or 'transmurale zorg' (in the Netherlands).