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Doctor, professor, and researcher Jill Thistlethwaite reflects upon interprofessional education and the impact which teamwork has upon health care.

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While educators may pride themselves on innovations, the truth is that most change is driven by social factors and policy rather than by research. We are often at the whim of our politicians, regardless of our much-vaunted professional autonomy. So our complex question might be: What are the drivers for change in health professional education, how might we influence policy regarding these and what effects will they have? Rather than ‘what will education look like in twenty years?

In 2007, a partnership of academics, educators and health professionals from the University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) was awarded an Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant to undertake a scoping and development study to establish a national research and development agenda for interprofessional education (IPE) within higher education with the aim of enhancing collaborative health care delivery. The project was titled ‘Learning and Teaching for Interprofessional Practice in Australia (L-TIPP, Aus)’.

As part of a World Health Organization (WHO) initiative we searched the literature to explore defined learning outcomes for interprofessional education between 1988, when the last WHO technical report on interprofessional education was published, and 2009. We describe and synthesize findings from 88 citations over this 21 year period. There is a variety in the way learning outcomes are presented but there are many similarities between specific outcomes and/or objectives. Papers describing educational interventions do not always include specific outcomes or objectives.

OBJECTIVE: A substantial literature engaging with the directions and experiences of stakeholders involved in interprofessional health education exists at the international level, yet almost nothing has been published that documents and analyses the Australian experience. Accordingly, this study aimed to scope the experiences of key stakeholders in health and higher education in relation to the development of interprofessional practice capabilities in health graduates in Australia.

CONTEXT: Interprofessional education (IPE) is not a recent phenomenon and has been the subject of several World Health Organization reports. Its focus is on health professionals and students learning with, from and about one another to improve collaboration and the quality of patient care. The drivers for IPE include new models of health care delivery in the context of an ageing population and the increasing prevalence of long-term chronic disease, in addition to the patient safety agenda.

The core values of both interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP) and relational coordination (RC) include the provision of the best possible care through optimal communication between all participants involved in that care including professionals and support staff as well as patients and their families. Both approaches stress the need to build shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect across professional boundaries.

This paper focuses on a context where interdisciplinarity intersects with interprofessionality: the work of children's services professionals who address the needs of children identified as vulnerable. It draws on evidence and perspectives from two disciplines – educational studies and health care – to consider the issues and challenges posed by learning and/or working across disciplinary boundaries and why these have proved so obdurate.

This paper uses (and perhaps abuses) deconstruction to revisit the meanings of collaboration and practice. We start with a description of deconstruction itself, as espoused by Jacques Derrida, and then move onto challenging the notion that words, such as collaboration, can have fixed meanings.

Practice-based learning (PrBL) occurs in all health professional training but there are intra- and interprofessional differences depending on context, location and professional identity. In this position paper I will explore the definition, context and elements of PrBL across the health professions, and their implications for interprofessional education (IPE).