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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.

This study retrospectively investigates clinical workplace providers’ perspectives on their participation over the first 3 years of an IPE programme in a New Zealand rural community with a high Māori population.  From the providers’ perspectives, the programme met its objectives. Furthermore, providers noted several students had re-located back to the area to work as health professionals, suggesting investment in the programme added long-term value to the community.

In the health professional education literature, there is a need for information about the teaching and learning of medical laboratory sciences for clinical practice. This reflection-on-practice describes how an orofacial pathology interprofessional education (IPE) initiative was designed and implemented. Aspects to consider for upscaling the initiative include staffing, scheduling, assessment, and cultural perspectives.

This research explores the influence of primary care practice interior architecture on face-to-face on-the-fly communication for collaborative care. An observational study was undertaken to compare face-to-face informal interactions between staff in three primary care practices of differing interior architecture. Data collected from practices included: direct observations floor plans, photographs, interviews, and surveys.

This integrative review highlights the need to look critically at the body of research purported to investigate interprofessional collaboration in primary care settings and suggests the value of using direct observational methods to elucidate this. Direct observation of collaborative practice in everyday work settings holds promise as a method to better understand and articulate the complex phenomena of interprofessional collaboration, yet only a small number of studies to date have attempted to directly observe such practice.

This study describes and compares evaluation feedback from students in undergraduate nursing and medicine programmes about the learning outcomes of an interprofessional education initiative. Findings were interpreted to indicate that students from both programmes valued the learning outcomes, and this was greater at the end of the session. Notably, the perceived value of interprofessional learning was higher for nursing students than medical students before and after the session.

This evaluation explored student and tutor reactions to IPE, and any changes in perceptions and attitudes. A workplace-based, 6-hour IPE pilot on cancer care, led by clinical tutors, was undertaken in a New Zealand hospital.  Both students and tutors reported benefits from having IPE in the workplace environment, with cancer care seen as a suitable topic. Students reported a better understanding of professional roles, skills and the provision of collaborative care, and suggested other professions should be included in future IPE.