Case-Managers and integrated care
Résumé
This chapter on case management starts with a case story about Julia, a person with dementia, and her case manager, John (Sect. 4.1). It shows six innovations which are necessary to introduce case managers. Julia and John live in the year 2025, in a rich western country with a health system that supports integrated care by means of adequate financing and digitalization of care. Section 4.2 introduces a definition of the concept of case management and discusses important terms in it. Then (Sect. 4.3), two specific competences of case managers are discussed: (1) the assessments of care and social needs and (2) empowering interviewing of clients. The chapter continues (Sect. 4.4) with the comparison of the “ideal world” in the case story in 2025 with the real world in 2015 by focusing on case management practices in The Netherlands and France. The chapter ends (Sect. 4.5) by offering theories to support the implementation of the case manager. The chapter emphasises that case managers are not only for clients with dementia but are relevant as an approach to support other people with health, educational and financial problems; clients with developmental delays; patients with severe mental illness; patients with cancer and metastases; and persons with more than one chronic condition. In this chapter, the words clients, patients and persons are used as synonyms occurring in different care contexts.