Resource Center

The greatest resource for improving interprofessional learning and practice is the knowledge, wisdom, and energy of professionals who adapt to challenging situations in their everyday work. We call collective capability the ability of a group of professionals to balance two interdependent levels of organization of practice: what professionals know and what they do collectively over time. Organizing what professionals know links the relational value--caring for patients--to the knowledge value of practice.

The healthcare system continues to evolve, requiring innovation to promote patient-centred, fiscally responsible healthcare delivery. This evolution includes changes to the skills and competencies required of the health human resources (HHR), both regulated and unregulated, who are central supports to healthcare delivery. This has become a priority agenda item at the international, national, provincial, regional and local levels.

Context: Interprofessional collaboration is gaining increasing prominence as a team-based approach to health care delivery that synergistically maximises the strengths of each health professional to enhance patient care, decrease medical errors and optimise efficiency. The often neglected role that student leaders have in preparing their peers, as the health professionals of the future, for collaboration in health care should not be overlooked.

This paper explores the culture underlying the practices of physicians and other health care providers in the 20th century and implications for interprofessional education for collaborative practice in the 21st century. Today's practice of medicine flows from the 1920s work of Dr. Abraham Flexner recommending that North American medical schools introduce rigor and consistency in teaching, moving them from private, for-profit, somewhat ad hoc institutions to university affiliation employing physicians dedicated to teaching and research.

For more than 35 years, interprofessional collaboration across the health and human service professions has been promoted as an important means to advance patient- or client-centered practice. Evidence demonstrates that collaborative care in certain circumstances can be more effective and efficient than other models. Over the past decade, in response to national calls to action, American and Canadian health and human service professionals and educators have renewed their focus on interprofessional education (IPE).

Much that has been written about interprofessional education (IPE) and the interprofessional team has concentrated on two or at most three professions, primarily medicine, nursing and pharmacy. Educational programs described in the literature tend to focus on activities involving students, practitioners or both.Very little has been written about the structural changes that need to be made within universities, colleges and the healthcare industry such that IPE becomes a joint responsibility across a number of jurisdictions that may then effectively influence institutional practice.

Structural changes need to be made within universities such that interprofessional education for patient-centred collaborative practice becomes a responsibility that crosses faculty jurisdictions and is accepted as the responsibility of all associated health and human service programs. In communities, the patient or client is the centre of professional attention requiring care that goes beyond the skill and scope of any one profession.

Interprofessional activists enjoy ever more opportunities to exchange experience between countries thanks to electronic communications, study visits, conferences and, of course, this Journal. An international organisation to promote such exchange has, however, until now been conspicuously lacking.

In response to community demand, The Office of the Coordinator of Health Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Canada developed a two-day Interprofessional Team Building workshop and piloted it twice. The workshops included faculty and students with clinical experience from nine different health and human service programmes. The design of the workshop was drawn from team-building theory and exercises used in business education. It was augmented by clinical examples and case-based discussions.

The Triple Aim unequivocally connects interprofessional healthcare teams to the provision of better healthcare services that would eventually lead to improved health outcomes. This review of the interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice empirical literature from 2008 to 2013 focused on the impact of this area of inquiry on the outcomes identified in the Triple Aim.