Person-centered and integrated care for older people: Successful experiences across Sweden

Older people are often affected by multiple long-term conditions (i.e. multimorbidity) and have, thus, regular contact with several health and social care professionals on top of the care received from families, friends and volunteers.

It is critical that all these actors work together in order to better meet the rising health and care demands of older adults.

In response, many countries including Sweden have started to endorse structural and financial reforms to promote integrated care.

Despite the abundance of new models and experiences, even withing Sweden, we still lack a deep understanding of what the shift towards person-centered and integrated care means in practice, the range of benefits that can be achieved from pursuing this way of working, and/or how we can support the development of this type of approaches throughout the country.The objective of this conference is precisely to assemble and reflect upon the rich and varied integrated care initiatives in our country, in the hope that these examples will provide lessons as the development of integrated care continues in Sweden.

By means of this one-day conference organized by a multidisciplinary group of experts from Karolinska Institutet, we aim to bring together researchers, managers, health and care professionals, and policy and decision makers throughout Sweden.

Our ultimate goal is to advance the science, knowledge and adoption of person-centered and integrated care policy and practice in our country in order to address today’s global health challenges of an aging population.