The Integrated Care for Older People, a HSE driven initiative has thanked the students of the MSc in Marketing Consumption and Society for their great work in setting up a website for the project. Founded in 2015, the Integrated Care Programme for Older Persons (ICPOP) improves the lives of older persons by providing access to integrated care and support that is planned around their needs and community. The importance of this website is down to the fact the aging population of Ireland is always increasing. This provides a new set of challenges for the existing health and social care systems. For this reason, the Integrated Care team was created to offer cohesive care services for older people. Aiming to develop integrated services for older people with complex health needs. One of the many benefits of the ICPOP is that it shifts the delivery of care away from hospitals towards community-based, planned and coordinated care.
Until recently this important programme had no website. Therefore, a group of six University of Limerick students contacted the ICPOP Team after being given the task of building and marketing a website as part of their Digital Marketing module. Over the last few weeks, the students have collaborated with P.J. Harnett, Programme Manager Integrated Care for Older Persons, to build the site. Speaking after its launch P.J. remarked “Everyone in the team is delighted with the website. The quality of what these students produced is astounding, especially considering the small time frame in which they had to put it all altogether. For us, it’s great to finally have a place people and institutions around the country can go to learn about our work.”
Having published the site the students must now work on marketing the site. Daniel, one of the students involved in the project told An Focal: “This was a really exciting and challenging project for us. None of us had made a website before. Let alone one for such a massive government body like the HSE. The website is up and running now so the second step is creating an effective marketing campaign to let people know its there..” Another member of the group Earl adds: “We have quite a few practical projects in our course, which is great because it prepares us for workplace later. This project really stands out though as it was also fun and gave us all a massive sense of pride and accomplishment”
To visit the website click on this link: https://www.icpop.org/
Molly Cantwell 
Olivia O'Dwyer 
Joe Costigan