Dr. Gail Jensen, Dr. Barbara Maxwell, and Dr. Susan Tappert 

Presentation Slides | Questions

Culture is one of the most important and often challenging elements in facilitating organizational change.   Integration and collaboration among health professions requires all of us to find creative and innovative ways to promote interprofessionalism. This webinar will focus on bridging both theory and practice in creating a culture of interprofessionalism. The webinar is designed to address the needs of educators, practitioners, leaders and policy makers and will be divided into the following three sections.

Loosely Coupled Systems: Academic and clinical organizations share the distinction of bringing together “professionals” with strong autonomous professional identities to do their work in what often results in a “loosely coupled organization.”  Interprofessionalism challenges organizations to assume a more tightly coupled system where collaborative care and a shared, collaborative team identity may be necessary to facilitate cultural change.

Contact Theory to develop IP groups: Contact Theory, has its origins in the work of Allport (1979) on intergroup prejudice. Allport suggested that bringing groups together was insufficient to reduce negative intergroup attitudes and stereotyping. Allport suggested several important conditions for contact which were articulated in the “Contact Hypothesis”. In this section we will describe the “Contact Hypothesis” and provide an example of how the theory was applied to the inception and development of an interprofessional collaborative consisting of faculty and patient / caregiver advocates drawn from four universities.

Self Defining Organization, Autopoiesis: In the third section of the presentation we will discuss the use of a structure of self defining organization to develop and expand a culture of interprofessionalism at a Health Sciences University.