Meeting the needs of patient–interprofessional practice

Collaborative practice is the process whereby members of different professions and/or agencies work together to provide integrated health and/or social care for the benefit of service users (Pollard et al, 2005: 10).

As much as a decade ago the Department of Health (DoH) published a consultation document outlining a review of National Health Service (NHS) workforce planning, in which recommendations were made that interprofessional practice (IPP) be more widely adopted for the benefit of service users (Department of Health, 2000a). Since then the concept has developed and now extends beyond the medicine and nursing professions to include other healthcare professions. The new initiatives meant major cultural changes within the NHS; staff that had been used to working uniprofessionally had to embrace a new culture of mutual respect and shared values (Pollard et al, 2005).

Various terms are used to describe collaborative practice within the healthcare setting; interprofessional is the term that is commonly used specifically to describe interaction between professionals with common goals in working together (Leathard, 2009) Authors will also use the terms, intraprofessional and multiprofessional and in some texts multidisciplinary is used to describe collaborative practice. Whatever term is used the common theme is that they all refer to styles of work undertaken by professionals.