Helen Salisbury: Neighbourhood teams are disintegrating—to make them work, we need more staff

The aim of an integrated neighbourhood team (INT) is to bring medical, nursing, and social care services to the patient’s home (or nearby) in a timely fashion, which should prevent unnecessary hospital admissions and enable earlier discharge, thus saving the NHS money and minimising disruption for patients. These ideas seem so obvious that it’s hard to work out why they haven’t been tried before. They have, of course—but because such programmes identify unmet health needs, they usually result in more spending rather than less.1 In trying to understand the latest neighbourhood team iteration, one stumbling block is the definitions: what do we mean by a neighbourhood? It can’t be based on the area of a GP …