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This paper highlights the research challenges that face researchers wishing to build the evidence base around interprofessional education (IPE). It concentrates specifically on the short-term impact of IPE on a student population. The Contact Hypothesis is a particularly useful theoretical framework to address these challenges as well as guide the development of IPE interventions. A brief description of this theory and the closely-related theories of social identity and categorization is made in order to support and clarify this theoretical position.

This chapter presents a view of social innovation as a process of knowledge coproduction between interdisciplinary actors. It offers theoretical perspectives of knowledge classification and activity theory as a means of understanding this process. It provides recommendations on how the public sector workforce may be prepared to engage in coproduction to achieve social innovation, considering some of the values and competencies they require and practical ways, through transformational learning and crossing boundary workshops, to achieve this.

There is increasing interest in the theoretical underpinning of interprofessional education (IPE) and writers in this field are drawing on a wide range of disciplines for theories that have utility in IPE. While this has undoubtedly enriched the research literature, for the educational practitioner, whose aim is to develop and deliver an IPE curriculum that has sound theoretical underpinnings, this plethora of theories has become a confusing, and un-navigable quagmire.

Theoretical awareness is essential in the development and delivery of effective interprofessional education and collaborative practice (PECP). The objective of this paper was to explain the origins and purpose of an international network, IN-2-THEORY--interprofessional theory, scholarship and collaboration: a community of practice (CoP) that aims to build theoretical rigor in IPECP. It explains why the network is viewed as a CoP and lays out the way forward for the community based on the principles for developing a CoP outlined by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002).; 

Theory is essential to understand our interprofessional educational (IPE) practice. As a discipline, IPE has moved from being widely atheoretical to having a plethora of theories imported from the psychosocial disciplines that have utility to understand, articulate and improve IPE practice and evaluation. This paper proposes that when taking this deductive approach to theoretical development in IPE, a greater focus must now be placed on the rigorous testing of these theories within the IPE context.

In this Guide, we support the need for theory in the practice of interprofessional education and highlight a range of theories that can be applied to interprofessional education. We specifically discuss the application of theories that support the social dimensions of interprofessional learning and teaching, choosing by way of illustration the theory of social capital, adult learning theory and a sociological perspective of interprofessional education.

A peer-reviewed research paper comparing the properties of the IEPS and the RIPLS for measuring attitudes of three health professions (medicine, physicain assistant studies and pharmacy).

Enabling collaboration is presently a topic of great interest within the Canadian health system. Perhaps due to its inherent complexity, collaboration in not easily summarized in a single definition, nor has its efficacy been validated through empirical evidence. Until proven otherwise, an ongoing justification for improving collaboration in health systems remains that it intuitively makes sense.    

What does seem clear is that collaboration’s ultimate success or failure will be affected by a combination of interactional, organizational and systemic determinants that include: 

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been advocated in a number of policy documents for nearly 30 years as the main route to enhancing collaboration. Consequently, there has been a steady growth in IPE activity in this country and abroad. Despite this expansion, literature reveals that the planning and delivery of IPE remains a localized and rather haphazard affair with little understanding of the factors that influence its development or implementation.

The Institute of Medicine’s Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education (IOM, 2013) report looks at examples of teamwork and collaboration in education and practice that use interprofessional education (IPE) to achieve better patient care; to obtain better health outcomes; and to increase the value of educational and health care systems relative to outcomes.