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This study aimed to test both the feasibility of undertaking a collaborative method of enquiry as a means of investigating patient perceptions about teamwork in the context of their current health care, and also to compare and contrast these views with those of their usual health professionals in New Zealand suburban health practice settings.

This study aimed to test the feasibility of delivering an interprofessional component within existing health professional courses for medicine, physiotherapy and dietetics at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. Survey results indicated pre-existing positive attitudes to interprofessional practice and education among students. There was a statistically significant increase in positive attitude towards such practice and education, and increased confidence in the effectiveness of heath care teams.

This paper outlines the basis of interprofessional education, its relationship to interdisciplinary teamwork in primary care clinical practice, and describes a New Zealand model of postgraduate interprofessional education. Barriers to the implementation of interprofessional education in NZ were identified as well as possible solutions. In NZ, despite health authorities advocating clinical teamwork and interprofessional education, a variety of structural and attitudinal barriers challenge the development and practice of interprofessional education.

For the first time [from 2012], New Zealand nursing, medical, physiotherapy, pharmacy and dental students have a chance to participate in a purpose-built interprofessional programme of clinically-based learning as one component of their final year courses.

This longitudinal study aimed to ascertain former students' perceptions of and influences from a final-year pre-registration, rurally-located, clinically-based, 5-week interprofessional program on their subsequent work and career in the health professions. The study found that this work reports positive influences on subsequent careers among respondents who had previously participated as final-year students in the IPE  program, particularly with respect to interprofessional working, rural health, and contextual and cultural influences.

This paper explores attitudes to, and perceptions of, the impact of interprofessional postgraduate education for primary healthcare professionals, based on a postal survey of 153 primary healthcare professionals undertaking postgraduate qualifications in New Zealand. This study found that interprofessional postgraduate qualification study for primary health care professionals in New Zealand resulted in personal and professional benefit for individuals and their clinical practice, and increased understanding about their own and other health professionals’ roles.

Interprofessional education serves to strengthen professional identity, value all the health professions, and celebrate difference. It is fundamentally aligned with and integral to a range of important current practice discourses—the need for practitioners to optimise skills, relentlessly pursue quality and safety, be culturally competent, undertake ethical decision-making, be able to participate effectively and respectfully in health care teams, and be able to lead health system reform that reduces health inequalities, and benefits individuals, families and communities.

The successful delivery of primary care– led care requires effective teamwork and interprofessional practice (IPP) on the part of all health professionals. This sounds sensible, and is often assumed, but is much less often achieved.

This study set out to explore roles of, and relationships between, nurses and doctors currently working in New Zealand primary care settings. Findings indicate that effective interprofessional relationships between individual doctors and nurses can, and often do, exist in New Zealand primary care settings, although they are not universal. The identification and separation of vocational and business roles, and the development of professional identity, form the basis for a theory of trust development in nurse-doctor interprofessional relationships in New Zealand primary care.

This paper is based on an address given (in collaboration with Eileen McKinlay and Tony Dowell) at the WIPA Long Term Conditions Symposium, Porirua, March 2006.