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This review seeks to situate the contemporary Australian field of IPL/IPE within its history, nationally and internationally, in order to illuminate how it has taken the form and shape that it has, how it relates to international agendas in health and health professional education and shifts in the higher education sector, and to resource a research and development agenda for system-wide change. The review addresses the following questions:

When you're admitted to a hospital, the hope is that you will get better. But according to the Journal of Patient Safety, as many as 440,000 people every year die because of medical errors. That would make medical error the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer. These statisitics, combined with incentives under the Affordable Care Act to improve quality, are prompting medical schools to teach students to work in teams.

Brief description of a community-based interprofessional education session integrating caregivers (patients' families and support systems) as part of the interprofessional team.  Goals were to increase student awareness of the unique challenges caregivers face and to work as part of an interprofessional team to address these challenges. 

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to identify and report physician assistant (PA) student experiences, learning, and opinions regarding interprofessional education (IPE).

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.