The first two articles in this series have shown the direction of travel for health and social care in England, and how the status quo in already stressed systems is not viable. It is difficult to disagree with the principles of ‘integrated care’, yet we currently lack evidenced models on which we might build. There is a need for experiential learning and sharing of experiences. This third article describes in more granularity the experiences, positive and negative, of an early-adopting integrating service in south-east London that incorporated aspects of the local authority and secondary care physical and mental health services. It provides structured guidance on which types of integration one might aim for, managing internal and external relationships, and discussion on evaluating progress.

Turning the wealth of health and social data into insights to promote better public health, while enabling more effective personalized care, is critically important for society. In particular, social determinants of health have a significant impact on individual health, well-being, and inequalities in health. However, concerns around accessing and processing such sensitive data, and linking different datasets, involve significant challenges, not least to demonstrate trustworthiness to all stakeholders. Emerging datatrust services provide an opportunity to address key barriers to health and social care data linkage schemes, specifically a loss of control experienced by data providers, including the difficulty to maintain a remote reidentification risk over time, and the challenge of establishing and maintaining a social license. Datatrust services are a sociotechnical evolution that advances databases and data management systems, and brings together stakeholder-sensitive data governance mechanisms with data services to create a trusted research environment. In this article, we explore the requirements for datatrust services, a proposed implementation—the Social Data Foundation, and an illustrative test case. Moving forward, such an approach would help incentivize, accelerate, and join up the sharing of regulated data, and the use of generated outputs safely amongst stakeholders, including healthcare providers, social care providers, researchers, public health authorities, and citizens.

Part 1 of this three-part series on integrated care discussed the drivers for change in healthcare delivery in England set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. This second part explores the evolution of mental health services within the wider National Health Service (NHS), and describes important relevant legislation and policy over the past decade, leading up to the 2019 Long Term Plan. We explain the implications of this, including the detail of emerging structures such as integrated care systems (ICSs) and primary care networks (PCNs), and conclude with challenges facing these novel systems. Part 3 will address the practical local implementation of integrated care.

Health and social care face growing and conflicting pressures: mounting complex needs of an ageing population, restricted funding and a workforce recruitment and retention crisis. In response, in the UK the NHS Long Term Plan promises increased investment and an emphasis on better ‘integrated’ care. We describe key aspects of integration that need addressing.