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INTRODUCTION: Effective teamwork and interprofessional collaboration are vital for healthcare quality and safety; however, challenges persist in creating interprofessional teamwork and resilient professional teams. A study was undertaken to delineate perceptions of individuals involved with the implementation of an interprofessional patient safety competency-based intervention and intervention participants.

The field of interprofessional research has grown both in size and in importance since the 1970s. In this paper, we use a macrosociological approach and a Bourdieusian theoretical framework to investigate this growth and the changing nature of the field's research. We investigate publication trends at the aggregate (field) level, using an original dataset of 100,488 interprofessional-related articles published between 1970 and 2010 and recorded in the PubMed database. Articles were coded using a list of 638 codes that were then analyzed thematically and longitudinally.

Authors have commented on the limited use of theory in the interprofessional field and its critical importance to advancing the work in this field. While social psychological and educational theories in the interprofessional field are increasingly popular, the contribution of organizational and systems theories is less well understood. This paper presents a subset of the findings (those focused on organizational/systems approaches) from a broader scoping review of theories in the organizational and educational literature aimed to guide interprofessional education and practice.

BACKGROUND: The delivery of effective, high-quality patient care is a complex activity. It demands health and social care professionals collaborate in an effective manner. Research continues to suggest that collaboration between these professionals can be problematic. Interprofessional education (IPE) offers a possible way to improve interprofessional collaboration and patient care.

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.