You can see a video version of this blog at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FhtOTPgw0
Community-Oriented Integration Network (COIN) is an international network of friends who care about healthy communities, particularly in the context of health and social care. Every so often COIN members stand back and consider the best use of our collective energies in the coming period. July 2023 was one of these moments.
COIN emerged in 2018 from London Journal of Primary Care (2008-2018), which emerged from an alliance between the three Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Faculties in London. Both included primary care practitioners who want to develop the health of families and communities, as well as treat individual diseases in individual patients.
COIN’s holistic focus has attracted interest from people of different disciplines and places, leading to an international network of friends who use COIN as a place to develop their ideas about complexity. Here are some of the COIN discussions of the past few years:
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Partnerships between Public Health & Primary Care
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The relationship between Mental Health and Mental Illness
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Synchrony between Social Prescribing and Children’s Centres
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Collaboration for Health & Care within geographic areas (“Primary Care Networks” in the UK)
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The power of Music and other Arts to build Healthy Communities
The theme for 2022 was End of Life Care and the need to help Carers to facilitate “Healthy Deaths” www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/full/10.12968/bjcn.2022.27.9.432. This has resulted in the development of a Course for End-of-Life Carers.
In 2022, COIN members wrote a position paper called “Developing Community-Oriented Integrated Practice” https://www.healthmatters.org.uk/Library/coip_0322.pdf.
The theme for 2023 has been the role of general (family) practice in the 21st Century. The July 2023 COIN meeting helped to clarify that:
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COIN intends to move forward the idea of Community-Oriented Integrated Practice.
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It is a Think Tank rather than a Pressure Group and influences change through its members and their organisations.
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The COIN discussion agenda emerges from its members, facilitated by a Planning Team.
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Members use COIN as a place to develop their thinking. Meetings are made into videos and speakers write blogs, published in Health Matters, that they might later like to rewrite as papers for other journals.
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COIN should use its broad membership to spread the idea of Community-Oriented Integrated Practice.
Do come along. Get on the mailing list by emailing lucja.kwapisiewicz@gmail.com.