Resource Center

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.

Interprofessional education (IPE) continues to be a central focus within health care and research spheres. As a result, there is a sustained interest in understanding its overall effects on learners, professions, organizations, and patients. Systematic reviews are instrumental in assessing evidence and informing disciplinary fields about the effects of interventions and providing direction for future activity and research. This paper provides a synthesis and critical appraisal of the evidence for IPE contained in the small, but growing, systematic review literature.

This article investigates the association between nurse-physician working relations and nurse-rated quality of nursing team care.The analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of registered nurses working in Canadian hospitals. Multiple logistic regression was used to examine the association between the quality of nurse-physician working relations and nurses' reports of fair or poor nursing team care on the last shift worked.

Interprofessional communication and collaboration are promoted by policymakers as fundamental building blocks for improving patient safety and meeting the demands of increasingly complex care. This paper reports qualitative findings of an interprofessional intervention designed to improve communication and collaboration between different professions in general internal medicine (GIM) hospital wards in Canada.

AIM: The aim of this paper is to explore some of the key socio-historical issues related to the leadership of interprofessional teams.

BACKGROUND: Over the past quarter of a century, there have been repeated calls for collaboration to help improve the delivery of care. Interprofessional teamwork is regarded as a key approach to delivering high-quality, safe care.