To gain insight into facilitators and barriers for the integration of community dementia care.

Qualitative focus group discussions and semistructured interviews.

Community care in a period in which the National Dementia Program stimulated integration of dementia care; at the same time, a new law stimulated market mechanism in care.

Professionals involved in the development of five dementia networks.

We conducted three focus group interviews and three face-to-face interviews with 17 professionals from various disciplines involved in the National Dementia Program. The data were analyzed using the grounded theory approach.

Analysis revealed facilitators and barriers affecting integration of dementia care. The facilitators were the intrinsic motivation to collaborate on improving dementia care, client-centeredness of the improvement projects, positive team climate, sufficient financial support and embedding of the improvement projects, and the well-structured, uniform format of the National Dementia Programme. At the individual level, the main barriers were demotivation, sub-optimal professional participation, insufficient funding of improvement projects, and market mechanisms and competition.

We hypothesize that societal trends strongly influence the level of inter-organisational collaboration and individual commitment, thereby modulating the effectiveness of integrative efforts in dementia care.