The art of integration: attracting and retaining staff in integrated early childhood services

The Infant’s Home Ashfield (TIH) has been on a journey, over several years, to provide integrated, universal and targeted, education, care, health and support services for young children and their families, with a particular focus on reaching children and families facing challenging circumstances (Wong & Press, 2012). An important aspect of TIH’s journey towards integrated service delivery has been the commitment amongst TIH senior staff to critically reflect on their practice and share these understandings more broadly. This paper is a result of that critical reflection. This paper is the first of several that investigate a particular challenge facing TIH in its aim to work in integrated, interprofessional ways. It is anticipated that the challenges faced by TIH will be similar to those facing other organisations on a similar journey, thus its learnings can usefully be shared. This paper explores the issue of attracting, retaining and sustaining staff to work in interprofessional, integrated ways. It begins with a brief summary of the literature. Next, findings from the project are presented around three distinct stages – strategic planning, recruitment, and retaining and sustaining. The paper concludes by drawing some implications for policy.