Being Interprofessional

Working interprofessionally is an essential part of successful health and social care provision in the twenty-first century. This engaging and easy-to-follow new text highlights the need for collaboration between practitioners from all branches of health and social care. It offers an indispensable guide to learning and working better together, and shows what being interprofessional really means. The book encourages students to sharpen their understanding of concepts and theories surrounding collaborative practice, with a clear emphasis on theory, policy and practice. Chapter-by-chapter, the book takes readers through the most important and relevant issues in contemporary health and social care, including working in teams, learning from others, policy issues, working with children and adults, and specialist practice. Through student-friendly case studies and thoughtful learning exercises, it also considers ways of applying these ideas to the real world. It covers work across the statutory, voluntary and community sectors, drawing on the insights and experiences of a wide range of service users, carers and a variety of practitioners. Being Interprofessional will be essential reading for students and practitioners in all branches of health and social care, such as nursing, social work, midwifery and youth work. Whatever their background, it will inspire readers to find new ways of working together to meet the needs of patients and clients.

Interprofessional teamwork and collaborative practice are emerging as key elements of efficient and productive work in promoting health and treating patients. The vision for these collaborations is one where different health and/or social professionals share a team identity and work closely together to solve problems and improve delivery of care. Although the value of interprofessional education (IPE) has been embraced around the world - particularly for its impact on learning - many in leadership positions have questioned how IPE affects patent, population, and health system outcomes. This question cannot be fully answered without well-designed studies, and these studies cannot be conducted without an understanding of the methods and measurements needed to conduct such an analysis. This Institute of Medicine report examines ways to measure the impacts of IPE on collaborative practice and health and system outcomes. According to this report, it is possible to link the learning process with downstream person or population directed outcomes through thoughtful, well-designed studies of the association between IPE and collaborative behavior. Measuring the Impact of Interprofessional Education on Collaborative Practice and Patient Outcomes describes the research needed to strengthen the evidence base for IPE outcomes. Additionally, this report presents a conceptual model for evaluating IPE that could be adapted to particular settings in which it is applied. Measuring the Impact of Interprofessional Education on Collaborative Practice and Patient Outcomes addresses the current lack of broadly applicable measures of collaborative behavior and makes recommendations for resource commitments from interprofessional stakeholders, funders, and policy makers to advance the study of IPE.

This text will demystify interprofessional education, showing readers how theory can be turned into practice. Aimed at those interested in establishing or developing IPE strategies within education and practice settings, it outlines tried and tested approaches, giving a true insight into the successes and outcomes when IPE is implemented.

Many students and practitioners are familiar with critical reflection but struggle to make space for it in their everyday practice. This book provides an accessible and practical introduction not only to doing critical reflection, but to being critically reflective. - It demonstrates how reflective capacity can be developed in different practice contexts and applied productively to supervision, teamwork and interprofessional working. - It outlines the different theoretical underpinnings and methods of critical reflection, exploring the use of visual images, writing techniques and group meetings. - It is rich with engaging case studies and questions for the reader that will help them to make critical reflection an integral part of their everyday practice. This book is an ideal guide to dealing with challenge and change across a range of social and healthcare services, including social work, nursing, youth and community work, counselling and allied healthcare professions.

How can social workers be more effective in collaborative work? What are the skills, knowledge and values required for collaborative practice? How does collaborative social work practice impact on the experience of service-users and carers? These questions are faced by social workers every day and interprofessional collaborative practice is high on the policy agenda for trainees and practitioners. Written primarily for social work students and practitioners, although having relevance across the wider range of stakeholders, this book explores the issues, benefits and challenges that interprofessional collaborative practice can raise. Chapter-by-chapter the book will encourage the reader to critically examine the political, legal, social and economic context of interprofessional practice. It also explores how social workers can work effectively and collaboratively with other professions while retaining their own values and identity. Key features include: - activities to illustrate the ways in which collaborative working can impact upon the experiences of service users, carers and practitioners; - discussions looking at the different people and organisations with whom social workers might work in practice; - examples of research and knowledge for practice; - a glossary to act as a useful quick reference point for the reader; - a companion website. Engaging and well-written, each chapter also includes case studies, reflective questions and links to further reading and sources of information. Interprofessional Collaboration in Social Work Practice will be essential reading for social work qualifying students and for practitioners.

A Handbook for Inter-professional Practice in the Human Services: Learning to Work Together is an essential text for all students of inter-professional education, and for practitioners looking to understand and develop better inter-agency working. With an emphasis on working collaboratively with fellow professionals, service users and the community, and developing an holistic approach to working, this is an essential resource for anyone studying on courses in social work, nursing, education, health, medicine, social policy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and dentistry, and for all those with an interest in the human services.

Interprofessional client-centered collaborative practice (ICCCP) is collective by nature, emerging as it does at the intersection of a wide variety of professional knowledge and scopes of practice. Many studies of ICCCP focus on the determinants or inputs of collaborative practice as well as on the results, outputs, or outcomes. This is echoed methodologically, as a preponderance of ICCCP teamwork studies primarily employ interview and survey data. However, close observations are also necessary to build understanding of the collective behavioral processes of interprofessional collaboration. Many authors point out the need for more studies of the actual practices of collaboration. In many senses, ICCCP represents what Rittel and Webber (1973) have called a "wicked" problem. (p. 155) Wicked problems are "difficult or impossible to solve. Their solutions depend on incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. And they are confounded by complex interdependencies between actors and agents." (Drinka & Clark, 2000, p. 37) If ever there was a wicked problem, innovation in ICCCP is surely one. As a series of possible solutions to this problem, the various case studies set out in this monograph are welcomed. Learning to become a competent health professional has always been a two-part process that which focuses on classroom'' teaching and that which engages students in an apprenticeship with qualified professionals in real-world settings. Universities, colleges, and institutes depend upon practice settings for the apprenticeship education of their health professional students. Practice education (PE) settings require competent health care professionals to deliver quality care to patients. Until recently, the delivery of health profession education has been almost entirely discipline based, with each discipline educating their own students in isolation whether on campus or in the community. As is clear in this book, there is now increasing emphasis on all health care professions to learn how to be competent collaborators. This emerging shift in education has led to a new interest in different approaches to the delivery of health professional education, approaches that embrace more opportunities for interactions amongst and between learners across health and human service/social care professions. PE settings are being recognized as ideal environments for interprofessional education (IPE), in which students can witness and practice how to work interprofessionally with others on healthcare teams -- that is, to learn about, with, and from each other, for the purpose of collaboration to improve quality of care. The chapters in this book focus on the many issues that confront healthcare professionals in their efforts to provide true interprofessional collaborative care, with the patient or client as the center of focus. The term practice tends to occupy a black box in interprofessional literature. Although it is frequently invoked in considerations of collaboration, teamwork, and team working, it is seldom explicitly defined. One exception comes from Thistlethwaite, Jackson, and Moran (2013), who suggested that practice can be understood in three ways: (a) as the enactment of a role or profession, (b) as a moment of collective unity or performance, and/or (c) as a "socially institutionalized and socially acceptable form of interaction requiring cognitive understanding and reflection." (p. 54) This book deals in a number of ways with these three ideas, thus providing a better understanding of the term practice by removing it from a black box and placing it within our concept of a partnership between a team of healthcare providers. It is now recognized that effective ICCCP requires the active engagement of students from different professions using interactive learning methodologies to develop health professional students'' knowledge, skills, attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. As noted in this book, ICCCP requires a complex adult learning (andragogy) approach that is most effective when integrated throughout a program of study, moving from simple to more complex learning activities that bridge from post-secondary to practice education settings. Educational accreditation standards being developed to stimulate the advancement of IPE will have an impact on policies in both the academic and clinical settings that encompass ICCCP. Continuing professional development (CPD) is an integral part of the learning continuum to ensure that ICCCP is built on a theory-informed base and sustained in changing healthcare environments. This book will serve as a much-needed primer to inform CPD in all aspects of ICCCP. The thoughtful and clearly articulated chapters contained here are, therefore, most welcome practical guides for practice educators, and a very useful source of information for a broader audience of healthcare providers who are faced with the complex issues that confront enactment of true ICCCP.

The book provides a critical exploration of the theory and practice related to teacher preparation for interprofessional learning. It makes an important contribution to the emerging evidence base through an in-depth exploration of the processes involved in teaching complex diverse groups, facilitator preparation, curriculum development and inter-institutional collaboration. Research-based evidence from the Promoting Interprofessional Education (PIPE) project helps teachers to further understand their own practice and build their own theories of teaching interprofessional learning. The enlightening analysis is vital reading for all health and social care professionals (including allied health professionals) involved in formal learning and workplace education. Healthcare education policy makers and shapers will also find it invaluable.