Back to the future? Lessons from the history of integrated child health services in England.

The UK has a long history of attempts to integrate child health services to improve outcomes, an ambition renewed in the recent . It's therefore timely to review the history of integration to inform future initiatives. Key milestones include the Platt report (1959), Court report (1976), (1999), (2004) and report (2015). These stand against a backdrop of national NHS policy changes, with a myriad of local integration initiatives and research efforts in parallel. We suggest lessons for future integration initiatives: integration may support the quadruple aim; integration depends on addressing divides between primary and secondary care; workforce and funding challenges need to be resolved before integration can thrive; high-quality research and evaluation of integrated interventions is required; strong relationships between professional groups are key to integration; and integration can help address health inequalities.