Sustainability and Interprofessional Collaboration

Interprofessional collaboration has grown significantly in health care organisations, becoming a critical part of the way in which health and social care is delivered. It is now seen as an essential part of effective health care delivery. Health professionals can be assigned to designated teams due to the increasing complexity of health care delivery, or more commonly a number of professionals with different expertise work together in collaborations which can be configured over some distance (Thistlethwaite, Dunston, & Yassine in Journal of Interprofessional Care 32:745–751, 2019).

The Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education (CAIPE) was established in 1987 as a United Kingdom charitable trust following a series of conferences and workshops organised by the Middlesex Polytechnic (now university). John Horder who had recently retired following a distinguished career in medicine was invited to be its leader. He saw the invitation as an opportunity to promote team-based primary health care, drawing on his pioneering work as a general practitioner in North London. To imply that his vision extended no further would be to do him less than justice.

Partnership is at the heart of interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP). Whether it is in a small clinical team, at the institutional level in a clinic or hospital, in the community, or in building regional interprofessional partnerships, the principles and processes followed to develop the partnership will determine its effective functioning.

The chapter highlights on a national movement in term of transforming health professional learning toward Interprofessional learning and practice in Thailand for the equitable access of the highest possible attainable standard of health. A group of nine health professions developed core competencies of the learners and fostered interprofessional learning and practice to impact individual and population health outcome. This aims to focus on how IPE can be systematically expanded to improve the quality of health care services and ensure skill-mix of qualified and motivated health workers in response to local health needs. The interprofessional learning and practice is one of the most effective approaches to address sustainable solution of critical health system dynamics and challenges.

“An ounce of practice is worth a thousand words.” by Mahatma Ghandi

This chapter describes the development of the global interprofessional research network (IPR.Global) from its roots in the Global Research Interprofessional Network (GRIN) and the In-2-Theory network.

The State of Qatar, an oil and gas rich nation, is a sovereign Arab state situated in the Arabian Gulf Region of the Middle East. The country’s population has grown significantly in the last twenty years, due to the large expatriate influx to the country, with a current estimated population of around 2.8 million, predominantly Arab, Indian, Nepali and Filipino (Forstenlechner & Rutledge in Middle East Policy, 18:25–43, 2011; World Population Review, 2019).

Australia is a country and a continent. Whilst health standards are ranked amongst the best in the world, its immense size and distributed population creates unique challenges for the delivery of integrated health and social care services.

This chapter explores the necessity of culturally responsive collaborative practice and leadership for working with Indigenous peoples and their families. Interprofessional collaborative practises with Indigenous peoples is about holding patients/clients and their whānau (extended family network) central and involving them as key players in their healthcare experience and decision-making. Drawing on Māori mātauranga (knowledge), the waka (canoe) illustrates collaboration and how everyone has leadership roles. The historical and contemporary contexts Indigenous people’s resilience provide examples to promote sustainable interprofessional collaboration.

This chapter will illustrate the process of developing sustainable undergraduate interprofessional education through embedding interprofessional learning within existing professional health programmes of study. Specifically, the evolving development of an interprofessional learning zone (IPLZ) is detailed. This has involved students and academic staff from seven clinical health professions collaborating on a shared vision, aims, pedagogy and the pragmatics of developing the health science undergraduate interprofessional learning zone at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand (Interprofessional Steering Committee, 2018).

In this chapter, we will outline how the curriculum for Interprofessional Education (IPE) at Linköping University was initiated, implemented and developed over the years, to become sustainable and valued by staff and students.

Regional, rural and remote Australia is diverse, not only in terms of the landscape, but also in ways that influence cultural, spiritual and operational aspects of health service delivery. Dotted across the landscape there are 16 Australian Government funded University Departments of Rural Health (UDRHs). These UDRHs support health professional students to undertake real world, rural focussed practice-based educational experiences, facilitated by interprofessional academic teams. As such, UDRHs can lay claim to considerable expertise in the delivery of interprofessional education, as well in the development and implementation of new models of interprofessioanl team-based care. This chapter describes the features of rural health services and the numerous intersections with interprofessional education and team-based health care.

This chapter presents the trajectory of interprofessional collaboration in health care in Brazil and discusses the most successful practices and challenges for promoting the sustainability of the model.

In this chapter, we share our experience of establishing‚ growing and sustaining the Knowledge and Skills Exchange (KASE)‚ a highly successful student-led IPE society at the University of Birmingham‚ UK. We offer ‘how-to’ guidance to others hoping to start a similar initiative‚ highlight important considerations for aspiring student leaders and faculty keen to support them; and reflect on the benefits and challenges we have experienced. We discuss how our experience has influenced our professional practice‚ both as newly qualified clinicians and as academic faculty‚ and share our vision for the student-led IPE societies of the future.

Trends in health care such as consumerism, the increased need for chronic care, and more involvement of patients in decision-making, provide powerful reasons to involve patients in the education of health professionals. In order for students to acquire the knowledge, skills, and especially the attitudes and behaviours, to put collaborative patient-centred care into practice, patients must become a core part of interprofessional education. We describe factors that have sustained the work of the Patient & Community Partnership for Education unit at the University of British Columbia, Canada, from university and community perspectives. Our key messages are the importance of relationships at different levels; long term commitment leading to other opportunities for involvement of the community and academy; reciprocity (mutual benefits); and the importance of creating positive experiences.

It has long been presented that leadership roles in health care are held by individuals who have a formal title and responsibility to hire, to monitor, and to evaluate those under their direct supervision. Theories of leadership have usually considered describing a leader as an individual who has some characteristics that are associated with leading or using skills to guide others. More recently, leadership scholars have challenged this view in light of the shifting trends towards team based practice in organisations and in particular health care settings. Since the early twenty-first century a shift in viewing the leader as working with followers through a relational perspective is being proposed.

The issue of sustainability is a problem for many people trying to lead projects, but it is particularly the case for informal leaders, who rely on influence rather than power. This chapter attempts to answer questions about what makes a resilient leader in collaborative projects in a low resource setting and explores leadership in three community-based collaborative practice projects in mental health. The projects discussed in this chapter are ‘passion projects’ that were initiated and managed by the leaders themselves and had not been ordered or commissioned by people above them in the hierarchy. Resources and influence had to be gained, rather than coming automatically. This chapter will explore how collaborative behaviours, motivation towards commons goals and values, autonomy, power and influence, access to resources, relatedness and personal connections and the motivation to collaborate influenced their leadership. We will also return to the concept of ‘distributed leadership’, which was discussed in the previous book (Shoesmith, Sawatan, Abdullah, & Fyfe, 2016) and consider whether the leadership seen in these projects was a function of the individuals or an emergent property of the networks of which they were part.

The themes of this book are sustainability and resilience within the interprofessional milieu, though they have applicability in many areas of health professional practice and education. In this final chapter we reflect on these two words, their meanings and relevance to interprofessional education and collaborative practice. We also consider the recurring language and concepts used by chapter authors to define, describe and analyse their work, and how these have resonated with ourselves.