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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.

These guidelines call for new approaches in health professionals’ education. Approaches are needed that transform systems and encourage the move away from the traditional focus on tertiary care hospitals to initiatives that foster community engagement. The guidelines recommendations support and advocate for implementation considerations in efforts to involve communities and countries collectively for this transformational change in health professionals’ education.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is an important contributor to ensuring interprofessional collaboration and, ultimately, improving the quality of health care. However, there is a gap in available resources on critical success factors for implementing intentional interprofessional learning experiences. The Interprofessional Collaborative Organizational Map and Preparedness Assessment (IP-COMPASS) is a quality improvement framework that provides a structured process to help health care organizations become better prepared to offer IPE.

This paper proposes a new concept and a frame of reference that should permit the development of a better understanding of a phenomenon that is the development of a cohesive and integrated health care practice among professionals in response to clients' needs. The concept is named "interprofessionality" and aims to draw a clear distinction with another concept, that of interdisciplinarity. The utilization of the concept of interdisciplinarity, which originally concerns the development of integrated knowledge in response to fragmented disciplinary knowledge, has caused some confusion.

Interprofessional Care: A Blueprint for Action in Ontario identifies approaches that will help to integrate interprofessional care into existing systems, legislation and infrastructures. This Blueprint was developed following a year-long process of obtaining input from decision-makers and leaders in the health care and education sectors, as well as consumers. Achieving effective implementation of interprofessional care requires a comprehensive action plan that identifies the roles each partner or participant should undertake.