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This paper explores the experiences of, and thoughts on, interprofessional learning and care of first year health science students at a large Canadian university within a broad socioeconomic context. We apply discourse analysis to survey data collected to evaluate an introductory interprofessional event involving first year students from a variety of health professions. Follow-up focus-group interviews were conducted to gain greater understanding of student issues and concerns emerging from the survey, providing a second source of data.

BACKGROUND: Communication and collaboration failures can have negative impacts on the efficiency of both individual clinicians and health care system delivery as well as on the quality of patient care. Recognizing the problems associated with clinical and collaboration communication, health care professionals and organizations alike have begun to look at alternative communication technologies to address some of these inefficiencies and to improve interprofessional collaboration.

BACKGROUND: Studies in General Internal Medicine [GIM] settings have shown that optimizing interprofessional communication is important, yet complex and challenging. While the physician is integral to interprofessional work in GIM there are often communication barriers in place that impact perceptions and experiences with the quality and quantity of their communication with other team members.

OBJECTIVE: This paper provides an overview of key developments of interprofessional education (IPE) in relation to its evolution over the past 30 years.

METHODS: A narrative review of the salient IPE literature was undertaken to generate key source materials for this paper.

BACKGROUND: Communication between clinicians is critical to providing quality patient care but is often hampered by limitations of current systems. Smartphones such as BlackBerrys may improve communication, but studies of these technologies have been limited to date.

OBJECTIVE: Our objectives were to describe how smartphones were adopted for clinical communication within general internal medical wards and determine their impact on team effectiveness and communication.

Appreciative inquiry (AI) is a relatively new approach to initiating or managing organizational change that is associated with the 'positiveness' movement in psychology and its offshoot positive organizational scholarship. Rather than dwelling upon problems related to change, AI encourages individuals to adopt a positive, constructive approach to managing change. In recent years, AI has been used to initiate change across a broad range of public and private sector organizations.

Despite the broad adoption of IPE across a number of educational institutions, in general, there continues to be little focus on the development and implementation of sound assessment strategies.

Primary care reform involving interprofessional team-based care is a global phenomenon. In Ontario, Canada, 150 Family Health Teams (FHTs) have been approved in the past few years. The transition to a FHT is complex involving many changes and the processes for collaborative teamwork are not clearly delineated. To support the transition to team-based care in FHTs, a project was undertaken to develop and implement a series of interprofessional protocols in four clinical areas.

While interprofessional education (IPE) activities have expanded across clinical contexts and countries in the past decade, our empirical understanding of this form of education is limited by an over-reliance upon studies which continue to focus on short term learner-focused outcomes. As a result we have only a partial understanding of the attributes needed to become an effective interprofessional facilitator.

OBJECTIVE: To examine family health team (FHT) members' perspectives and experiences of interprofessional collaboration and perceived benefits.

DESIGN: Qualitative case study using semistructured interviews.

SETTING: Fourteen FHTs in urban and rural Ontario.

PARTICIPANTS: Purposeful sample of the members of 14 FHTs, including family physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, dietitians, social workers, pharmacists, and managers.