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Interprofessional learning is seen as increasingly important for all health and social care workers. How this is integrated into the education of these workers is less clear and more of a challenge. This article describes an online learning activity used to facilitate interprofessional learning in a Faculty of Health and Social Care in the UK. An online conference was used to bring students together, utilising a real life case scenario based around a family within a virtual town. Students from a variety of programmes and professional groups participated in an asynchronous discussion forum.

Research suggests that health care can be improved and patient harm reduced when health professionals successfully collaborate across professional boundaries. Consequently, there is growing support for interprofessional collaboration in health and social care, both nationally and internationally. Factors including professional hierarchies, discipline-specific patterns of socialization, and insufficient time for teambuilding can undermine efforts to improve collaboration.

AIM: This paper is a report of a study to evaluate the influence of interdisciplinary seminars for undergraduate nursing and social work students on development of their understanding of the meaning of caring.

Communication among healthcare professionals is a focus for research and policy interventions designed to improve patient safety, but the challenges of changing interprofessional communication patterns are rarely described. We present an analysis of 756 preoperative briefings conducted by general surgery teams (anesthesiologists, nurses, and surgeons) at four urban Canadian hospitals in the context of two research studies conducted between August 2004 and December 2007.

OBJECTIVES: Despite the growing interest in integrative health care, collaborative care, and interdisciplinary health care teams, there appears to be little consistency in terminology and clarity regarding the goal for these teams, other than "working together" for the good of the patients. The purpose of this study was to explore what the terms integration and collaboration mean for practitioners and other key informants working in multiprofessional health care teams, with a specific look at chiropractic and family physician teams in primary care settings.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20602594

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19705312

Placing our practicum students into an interprofessional education (IPE) practicum without prior course work is an unorthodox idea, however, it was discovered that the road to IPE success is not along a single pathway. This multi-case study explores the experience of seven cohorts of pre-service professionals from the faculties of Education, Nursing, Justice Studies, Kinesiology and Health Studies and Social Work who engaged in a 14-week, full-time interprofessional internship in inner-city schools.

AIM: This paper is a report of a study exploring the perceptions of long-term care team members and nurse managers about barriers and facilitators to optimal use of nurse practitioners to manage residents' pain in long-term care settings.

BACKGROUND: Considering the high rates of pain in long-term care, research is needed to explore innovations in health-services delivery, including the emerging nurse practitioner role.

In this paper, the authors present the results of a study which delineated six key competencies of interprofessional collaborative practice for patient-centred care: communication; strength in one's professional role; knowledge of professional role of others; leadership; team function; and negotiation for conflict resolution.