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Preferred Citation: Weller J, Frengley R, Torrie J, Shulruf B, Jolly B, Hopley L, et al. Evaluation of an instrument to measure teamwork in multidisciplinary critical care teams. BMJ Qual Saf. 2011;20(3):216-22.

The extent to which health and social care (HSC) students hold stereotypical views of other HSC professional groups is of great potential importance to team working in health care. This paper explores students' perceptions of different HSC professional groups at the beginning of their university programmes. Findings are presented from an analysis of baseline data collected as part of the New Generation Project longitudinal cohort study which is assessing the impact of interprofessional education over time on a range of variables including stereotyping.

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 15-17, 1988 at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Introduction: The current state of our nation’s healthcare delivery system, including inefficiencies in healthcare delivery, health disparities, and wasteful costs, accentuates the call for responsive action. Interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) has emerged as an innovative strategy for addressing many of these inadequacies through the restructuring of healthcare delivery systems and health professions education within the United States.

Findings from an exploratory factor analysis on the 21 item `attitudes towards health

This research was part of a Health Canada funded initiative developed to provide evidence about the effectiveness of interprofessional education (IPE) interventions to promote collaborative patient-centred care. Health professional students' ratings of health professions and the effect of IPE on those ratings were examined. Participants were divided into three groups (N=51); control, education, and practice site immersion.

The authors report on the 2006 Pathways Into Health Conference held in Denver, Colorado.

This editorial emphasizes forging strong rural community-campus partnerships as a context for rural health professional education. An important aspect of this rural training initiative is the goal of simultaneously developing and enhancing rural health care delivery. The ways in which universal issues of rural life mix with local culture and health needs require training programs and delivery of services that are sensitive to these universals but are locally specific. In addition, there are major differences between urban- and rural-based interdisciplinary training experiences.

This editorial calls attention to a major U.S. interprofessional initiative, the Interdisciplinary Professional Educational Collaborative (IPEC), designed to introduce continuous quality improvement into interdisciplinary health professions education. Continuous quality improvement thinking and methods are now widespread in U.S. health care delivery.

In this editorial, the authors discuss three distinct, yet overlapping, fields – continuing education (CE), interprofessional education (IPE) and workplace learning (WPL) – can inform each other and extend our conceptual, theoretical and empirical understanding of continuing interprofessional education (CIPE) in the workplace. There are substantial challenges to achieving the aims as the individual fields continue to evolve (and contain areas of variation and contestation) over their definitions, use of theories and deployment as educational interventions in the healthcare system.