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INTRODUCTION Observational studies of the actual practices of interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP) are needed to complement research on the determinants and consequences of collaboration. This naturalistic study of team communication maps a key practice: the patient case review in daily rounds. Here, ICP is conceptualized as collective sensemaking, or the joint description of the patient’s situation and associated action planning—a fundamentally communicative practice.

As mobile smart device use has increased in society, the healthcare community has begun using these devices for communication among professionals in practice settings. The purpose of this review is to describe primary literature which reports on the experiences with interprofessional healthcare communication via mobile smart devices. Based on these findings, this review also addresses how these devices may be utilized to facilitate interprofessional education (IPE) in health professions education programs.

Health professionals have an obligation to improve both the health of the individual and the public in a time of scarce resources. The Institute of Medicine (IOM), Healthy People Curriculum Task Force and professional education accreditation standards indicate the need for health care professionals to demonstrate competencies related to community engagement, basic health promotion skills and the ability to work effectively in interprofessional teams.

With the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHR), there is a growing appreciation for the central role they play in clinical decision making and team communication, with many studies documenting new safety issues with integration of the EHR into the clinical enterprise. To study these issues, we created a high-fidelity simulation instance of our clinical EHR. In this paper, we describe the impact of integrating the EHR into high-fidelity, interprofessional intensive care unit (ICU) simulations, and the errors induced.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is an activity that involves two or more professions who learn interactively together to improve collaboration and the quality of care. Research has continually revealed that health and social care professionals encounter a range of problems with interprofessional coordination and collaboration which impact on the quality and safety of care. This empirical work resulted in policymakers across health care education and practice to invest in IPE to help resolve this collaborative failures.

There is a current focus within healthcare on interprofessional collaboration as an important tool in optimising health outcomes through effective, team-based care. Within higher education, interprofessional education is increasingly being incorporated into undergraduate health and allied health curricula. This article reports the implementation of a community-based, interprofessional student learning opportunity for undergraduate health and allied health students. Qualitative data were collected from the student and academic participants with a number of key themes identified.

Interprofessional collaboration is vital for the provision of quality patient care. Thoughtfully designed educational programs can help students of health professions develop interprofessional competencies and capacities, including values and ethics, roles and responsibilities, interprofessional communication, and teamwork (Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel, 2011).

The National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, a United States public–private partnership, was formed to provide national leadership, scholarship, evidence, and coordination to advance interprofessional education (IPE) and practice.

Understanding the impact that interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) might have on triple aim patient outcomes is of high interest to health care providers, educators, administrators, and policy makers. Before the work undertaken by the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at the University of Minnesota, no standard mechanism to acquire and report outcome data related to interprofessional education and collaborative practice and its effect on triple aim outcomes existed.

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