With ever increasing demands on the health and social care system, both politicians and technocrats have championed integration between the two sectors as a major element to meet this challenge. Even though verbal and explicit opposition to this policy is scarce, successful and sustainable integration efforts do not tend to be readily observable and wide-spread. The main objective of the goal-directed research in this article is to uncover to what extent social psychological processes play a role in this seeming “disconnect” between what people “say” and what they actually “do.” A total of 63 (n = 63) participants volunteered to partake in the study. The results indicate that healthcare participants indicate higher levels of social empathy, social perspective taking, and willingness to reach out and share resources as compared with those in social care during the explicit studies. Yet, the implicit data suggest a moderate to strong automatic bias which may well hinder integration efforts. We provide a way forward to increase the validity of these methods and provide recommendations for policy within health and social care integration in England. In addition, these recommendations have wider application to areas concerned with organisational change such as; mergers, acquisitions, and other collaborative working arrangements.

This paper is a collection of thoughts from multiple discussions about the importance of appreciating and embracing statistical thinking in public health research and education. We think that statistical simulations can play an important role in fostering statistical reasoning in public health and that they can be a great didactic tool for students to generate and learn from data. Two main points are of relevance here. First, simulations can foster critical thinking and improve our reasoning about public health problems by going from theoretical thoughts to practical implementation of designing a computer experiment. Second, simulations can support researchers and their students to better understand statistical concepts used when describing and analysing population health in terms of distributions. Overall, we advocate for the use of more simulations in public health research and education to strengthen statistical reasoning when studying the health of populations.

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