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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.

This editorial describes a supplement of the Journal of Interprofessional Care (JIC) which contains the 380 abstracts accepted for Collaborating Across Borders III (CAB III), a biennial US-Canadian conference, which was held in Tucson, Arizona on November 19-21, 2011.

In an earlier editorial, Dr. Virginia Tilden wrote about the national momentum toward interprofessional education (IPE) and the “tides of change” that have rapidly increased opportunities for nurse leaders to shape this agenda. The common goal of improving patient care through IPE has forged a high level of collaboration among education and practice leaders, potential funders and government.