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Over the past decade systematic reviews of interprofessional education (IPE) have provided a more informed understanding of the effects of this type of education. This paper contributes to this literature by reporting an update of a Cochrane systematic review published in this journal ten years ago (Zwarenstein et al., 1999 ). In updating this initial review, our current work involved searches of a number of electronic databases from 1999-2006, as well as reference lists, books, conference proceedings and websites.

OBJECTIVE: To implement and evaluate the effectiveness and short-term impact of an interprofessional education (IPE) session in the first year for health sciences students representing 9 health professions.

BACKGROUND: Interprofessional education (IPE)'s popularity as an effective strategy to enhance the ability of health professionals to work in interprofessional teams has grown substantially over the past decade.

AIMS: Building upon the work of Reeves ( 2001 ), this paper provides an updated systematic review of the effects of IPE on mental health providers delivering adult mental health care from 1967 to 1998.

Research suggests that health care can be improved and patient harm reduced when health professionals successfully collaborate across professional boundaries. Consequently, there is growing support for interprofessional collaboration in health and social care, both nationally and internationally. Factors including professional hierarchies, discipline-specific patterns of socialization, and insufficient time for teambuilding can undermine efforts to improve collaboration.

Background: Interest in interprofessional education (IPE) to promote effective interprofessional collaboration (IPC) has gained momentum across healthcare, professional education, and government sectors. In general, the IPE literature tends to report single-site studies. This article presents a rare study that reports a largescale multi-site IPE initiative. It draws upon a newly developed notion of mainstreaming—introduced to the literature by Barr and Ross—that helps illuminate the implementation issues related to an IPE initiative.

Effective interprofessional collaboration is an important factor in addressing health care needs and priorities. Educators and health care practitioners have argued that interprofessional education (IPE) is necessary to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors to work collaboratively and ultimately deliver enhanced patient/client care. The University of Toronto has implemented an introductory IPE session for approximately 1000 health science students that focuses on teamwork.

The Office of Interprofessional Education at the University of Toronto has sought students to conduct IPE research by offering summer studentships. This paper reports on one of these student research projects, which aimed to examine medical students' perceptions and experiences of IPE.

Significant investments are being made around the world to improve interprofessional collaboration, yet limits in our knowledge of this field restrict the ability of decision makers to base their decisions upon evidence. Clarity of the interprofessional field is blurred by a conceptual and semantic confusion that affects our understanding of key elements of education and practice activities, their interlinked relationship, and their effects on health or system outcomes.

The current conceptual problems related to IPE and IPC can be observed by the variety of terms employed to describe these interventions. Terms include “interprofessional learning”, “interdisciplinary collaboration”, “multiprofessional training”, and “transdisciplinary practice”.

BACKGROUND: Poor interprofessional collaboration (IPC) can negatively affect the delivery of health services and patient care. Interventions that address IPC problems have the potential to improve professional practice and healthcare outcomes.