Welcome to the 11th International Integrated Care Conference

On behalf of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC) it gives us great pleasure to welcome you to Odense for the 11th Annual Conference on Integrated Care. This year, IJIC celebrates its 10th anniversary. When IJIC was founded we recognised that the pursuit of better care co-ordination for patients was an ‘age-old’ theme, yet pondered on why care systems were so resistant to change. Today, however, it is clear that integrated care has moved from a backwater activity and into mainstream thinking. There is growing demand to understand ‘what works’ and ‘what value’ can be derived from care integration. A scientific journal like IJIC must play its part in supporting the evidence-base for the effective development, organisation and delivery of integrated care. Yet, we have only just walked beyond the foothills of integrated care as a scientific discipline and the evidence-base is promising but weak. This is why conferences such as this are so important in providing a stimulating environment for information exchange, networking and the generation of new ideas on integrated care. This year’s conference programme in Odense looks rich in interesting presentations and poster papers and we look forward to publishing the abstracts in our annual conference supplement. Of course, we hope that you will seek to write-up your policy analyses, academic research and/or innovative case studies in our Journal. If you are interested in writing for the Journal, please attend our workshop session (4.3) on Day 2 or visit our website at http://www.ijic.org. We would like to reserve our final thanks to the organising and scientific committees who have put so much work into this conference, but especially to Torben Larsen and his colleagues at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense for agreeing to be such welcoming hosts. We are, as ever, extremely grateful to you for all your hard work in putting together such a fine event. We wish all of you an inspiring and effective conference.