Resource Center

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.

While research has indicated that professionals can work in an effective manner spread across the continuum of care, professional biases, boundary protectionism and little opportunity to develop interprofessional competence has made effective collaboration extremely difficult (e.g.

With the explosion of enthusiasm for interprofessional education as a means to increase collaborative practice and improve important healthcare outcomes, many institutions are devoting new resources to interprofessional educational programs. In order to reach the overarching goal of interprofessional education that improves the health of patients, longitudinal curricula should include sequenced educational experiences that build toward proficiency in practice (Josiah Macy Jr.

Despite its increasing popularity for the training of interprofessional teams, crew resource management (CRM) has a number of limitations, which are often overlooked. In this editorial, the authors discuss the evolution of CRM, explore the evidence linked to its use in promoting interprofessional teamwork and discuss many of its limitations.

In this editorial, the authors outline the need for using (grand, mid-range and micro) theories to enhance our understanding of interprofessional education, practice and care. The authors argue why we need to engage in theoretical development in the interprofessional field, and why theoretical development should not be seen as a luxury, or low priority, but a central feature of the work we do developing and studying interprofessional education, practice and care.

This editorial explores how we can establish synergies between the field of informatics and the interprofessional field. The authors first provide some defining characteristics to help understand the nature of informatics and then discuss the array of functional (and dysfunctional) uses when designing and implementing informatics in healthcare.

In this editorial, the author explores the continued rise of competency frameworks in the interprofessional field. He outlines the growth of interprofessional competency frameworks and discusses some of the benefits they offer before examining their current shortcomings.

The Institute of Medicine's seminal report To Err is Human (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000) argued that to improve quality and safety, health care organizations needed to create interprofessional training opportunities for practitioners to learn interpersonal and technical skills in safe, simulated environments.

In this editorial, I extend this discussion by drawing upon the seminal work of C. Wright Mills (1967) who developed the notion of the ‘sociological imagination’ to provide a way of understanding, more deeply, the influences of different societal phenomena on the lives of individuals. I use this notion to argue why its use has a number of advantages for broadening our knowledge about the interprofessional field.