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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.

In this editorial, the authors examine some of the current limitations of interprofessional simulated learning activities and suggest the use of a sociological approach to help enhance the quality of this form of learning and improve its transferability to interprofessional practice.

Please note: The full text of this article is only available to those with subscription access to the Informa Healthcare database. Contact your institutional library or the publisher for details.

To date, within the interprofessional field there has been little effort to problematize key interprofessional concepts, interprofessional activities (courses, workshops), or evaluative approaches we have employed.  In this editorial, the author  elaborates on the importance of problematizing the elements embedded in our interprofessional work.

In this editorial, the author aims to ‘take stock’ of interprofessional education and interprofessional practice – empirically and theoretically – before sketching out some ideas for the future development of the field.
Please note: The full text of this article is only available to those with subscription access to the Informa Healthcare database. Contact your institutional library or the publisher for details.

Interprofessional education, continuing interprofessional education, interprofessional collaboration, and interprofessional care are moving to the forefront of approaches with the potential to reorganize the delivery of health professions education and health care practice. This article discusses 7 key trends in the scholarship and practice of interprofessional education: conceptual clarity, quality, safety, technology, assessment of learning, faculty development, and theory.

A central obstacle that faces governments and service providers alike is the acute shortage of health professionals — with all projections indicating the situation will certainly worsen as the skilled workforce shortage hits in the coming decades (Health Canada 2006).

Background: The Student Perceptions of Physician-Pharmacist Interprofessional Clinical Education (SPICE) instrument contains 10 items, 3 factors (interprofessional teamwork and team-based practice, roles/responsibilities for collaborative practice, and patient outcomes from collaborative practice), and utilizes a five-point response scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree).

Little is known about the nature of interprofessional collaboration on intensive care units (ICUs), despite its recognition as a key component of patient safety and quality improvement initiatives. This comparative ethnographic study addresses this gap in knowledge and explores the different factors that influence collaborative work in the ICU. It aims to develop an empirically grounded team diagnostic tool, and associated interventions to strengthen team-based care and patient family involvement.

BACKGROUND: Poor interprofessional communication in hospital is deemed to cause significant patient harm. Although recognition of this issue is growing, protocols are being implemented to solve this problem without empirical research on the interprofessional communication interactions that directly underpin patient care.