Education for Integrated Care & Health Systems
Education for Integrated Care & Health Systems
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Preparing future health professionals to understand care systems, work across boundaries, and contribute to better care.
Preparing future health professionals to understand care systems, work across boundaries, and contribute to better care.
How can we prepare professionals to work across boundaries of care?
Better care begins with learning to see and improve the systems around it.
Older people and their families experience care across hospitals, homes, long-term care services, and communities. Supporting them requires professionals who understand how these settings connect, how policies and resources shape care, and where gaps arise. Education has a crucial role in preparing learners to work across these boundaries and participate in meaningful change.
This work explores how integrated care and health systems can become concrete, teachable, and assessable parts of professional education. Grounded in Taiwan’s care context, we aim to help learners connect clinical decisions with people’s everyday lives and the wider systems that support them.
What we are exploring
What we are exploring
What should we teach?
What capabilities do learners need to understand, navigate, and improve care systems? We are exploring how systems-based practice, creative problem solving, and collaboration across professions and services can inform a locally relevant Health Systems Science framework. This includes identifying essential learning content across healthcare, long-term care, families, and communities.
How should we teach it?
How can learners develop these capabilities through meaningful engagement with real care challenges? We explore how social design, interdisciplinary projects, and learning with patients, carers, and practitioners can connect systems concepts with practical action and how these approaches might be adapted to different stages of training.
How should we assess learning?
How can we recognise progress in learners’ understanding and use of systems? We are developing approaches that combine self-assessment, project performance, and reflection to examine what learners can demonstrate, how their thinking develops, and which learning experiences support that development.
How we are developing this work
How we are developing this work
Developing curricula through practice
Our current starting point is Integrated Care and Social Design, an undergraduate course bringing together students from medicine and other disciplines. Students explore care experiences, identify problems, develop ideas, and refine proposals through prototyping and feedback. We are developing learning activities and teaching resources for each stage, while using course evaluation to guide revisions. This provides a foundation for future activities suited to senior medical students and postgraduate trainees.
Developing assessment tools
Alongside the curriculum, we are developing tools for assessing systems-based practice, organised around understanding systems, navigating systems, and improving systems. These include a learning self-assessment scale and project assessment rubrics, complemented by reflective accounts and assessment of creative problem solving. Bringing these sources together allows us to examine both learners’ perceived development and the capabilities demonstrated in their work.
Defining locally relevant competencies and content
Building on this educational work, we aim to clarify what Health Systems Science should encompass in Taiwan. This means connecting its broader concepts with local care arrangements, professional roles, and the experiences of older people and families. The emerging framework will link core competencies with learning content and opportunities for practice across different stages of education.
What this work is producing
What this work is producing
The programme is developing teaching resources, student work, and educational evidence that connect integrated care concepts with practical learning.
A framework of core competencies and learning content
An emerging framework connecting the capabilities learners need with the systems knowledge and practical experiences that support them. Initial work centres on integrated care, systems-based practice, and creative problem solving, providing a foundation for a broader Health Systems Science framework grounded in Taiwan.
Learning activities & teaching resources
Learning activities & teaching resources
A growing collection of course modules, fieldwork guides, workshop activities, and learning templates. These resources support students in exploring care experiences, mapping systems, defining problems, and developing proposals for improvement.
Educational evaluation tools
Tools under development to assess learning and improve teaching, including systems-based practice self-assessment scales, project assessment rubrics, and reflection prompts. Their use within the curriculum will inform further refinement and validation.
Student Design Proposals
Student Design Proposals
Grounded in the experiences of older adults and family carers, student projects explore care transitions, social prescribing, healthy ageing and inclusion in the communities around Southern Taiwan Science Park, family carer support, and age-friendly healthcare. Proposals take the form of service designs, digital tools, and redesigned spaces to improve care and everyday life.
Where this work is going
Where this work is going
Our longer-term aim is to build a coherent programme of education and research across undergraduate and postgraduate training. The current course provides an initial setting for testing ideas, developing resources, and understanding how learners engage with care systems.
Future work will pursue three connected directions: developing and evaluating curricula suited to different learning stages, including clinical undergraduate training and PGY programmes; strengthening the reliability, validity, and practical use of systems-based practice assessment tools; and constructing a locally grounded Health Systems Science framework that connects core competencies, learning content, and assessment.
Together, these strands aim to support a learning progression from understanding how systems shape care to working within them and contributing to their improvement.
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