PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Edward J Maile
AU  - Ritvij Singh
AU  - Georgia B Black
AU  - Mitch Blair
AU  - Dougal S Hargreaves
TI  - Back to the future? Lessons from the history of integrated child health services in England
AID  - 10.7861/fhj.2021-0093
DP  - 2022 Apr 19
TA  - Future Healthcare Journal
PG  - fhj.2021-0093
4099  - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/early/2022/04/14/fhj.2021-0093.short
4100  - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/early/2022/04/14/fhj.2021-0093.full
AB  - The UK has a long history of attempts to integrate child health services to improve outcomes, an ambition renewed in the recent The NHS Long Term Plan. It's therefore timely to review the history of integration to inform future initiatives. Key milestones include the Platt report (1959), Court report (1976), Sure Start (1999), National service framework (2004) and Facing the future report (2015). These stand against a backdrop of national NHS policy changes, with a myriad of local integration initiatives and research efforts in parallel.We suggest lessons for future integration initiatives: integration may support the quadruple aim; integration depends on addressing divides between primary and secondary care; workforce and funding challenges need to be resolved before integration can thrive; high-quality research and evaluation of integrated interventions is required; strong relationships between professional groups are key to integration; and integration can help address health inequalities.