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An interprofessional and interdisciplinary group of friends and colleagues with a common passion for interprofessional education for collaborative patient-centered practice (IECPCP) and the GRIN working group met in Toronto, Canada, in May 2012. Participants were identified for this orientation meeting to ensure representation by educators, clinicians, graduate students and international collaborators. Our aim was to discuss how the research agenda for IECPCP might be advanced with an emphasis on the nurturing and development of new researchers in the field.

The increasing focus of WHO Member States on primary health care (PHC) is seen as a means to achieve equitable, fair, affordable and efficient care. From the many approaches taken to PHC around the world, it is clear that major policy commitments will be required and that these will need to be accompanied by the active and collective involvement of stakeholders, particularly the health and social care professions, through informed and manageable implementation processes.

Interprofessional education for collaborative practice, also referred to as education for “team-based healthcare,” is a recent innovation in US health professions education.¹ Several specialties in medicine support this approach to care, for example, geriatrics, but educational preparation to deliver team-based care remains underdeveloped in the US. Will that change?

Probably, the most frequently asked question about interprofessional education (IPE) is “Does IPE make any difference to health care?” This question was posed in a slightly different way at the All Together Better Health meeting in London, UK, in July 1997. At that conference, two propositions were debated: “interprofessional education promotes collaboration” and “collaboration improves the quality of care” (Leathard, 1997).

Faculty of Medicine/Suez Canal University (FOM/SCU) students are exposed to clinical practice in primary care settings within the community, in which they encounter patients and begin to work within interprofessional health teams. However, there is no planned curricular interaction with learners from other professions at the learning sites.

Interprofessional education for collaborative practice is an important innovation globally and in US health professions education. The recent spotlight on interprofessional education in the United States was launched by a series of reports in the US Institute of Medicine's Quality Chasm series. They raised concerns over medical errors and health care quality as significant sources of morbidity and mortality in the United States and proposed health professions' education for patient-centered, team-based care as one means to address these concerns.

Interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) have been identified in health education and health care as playing an important role in improving health care services and patient outcomes. Despite a growth in the amount of research in these areas, poor conceptualizations of these interprofessional activities have persisted. Given the conceptual challenges, a scoping review of the interprofessional field was undertaken to map the literature available in order to identify key concepts, theories and sources of evidence.

Educational institutions have largely failed to provide innovative responses to emerging health human resources (HHR) needs. Reasons include the prevailing ratio policy, which simply increases the supply of professionals; university funding protocols; a guild structure that isolates health professions rather than integrating them; and current credentialing for entry to practice, which both controls and further balkanizes the professions.

The College of Health Disciplines, at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has a long history of developing interprofessional learning opportunities for students and practitioners. Historically, many of the courses and programmes were developed because they intuitively made sense or because certain streams of funding were available at particular times. While each of them fit generally within our understanding of interprofessional education in the health and human service education programs, they were not systematically developed within an educational or theoretical framework.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is called for in United States health professions education (Institute of Medicine, 2003). The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) includes interprofessional health education and practice as a strategic area in which the organization and members should engage (AAMC, 2007). The current status of IPE within United States medical schools has remained largely unexamined.