Medicine and the making of interprofessional education.

Abstract

Interprofessional education is a distillation of the investment made by the participating professions — medicine, nursing, allied health, social work and others — each instilling its values, knowledge, and skills accompanied by its preferred learning methods during a continuous process of negotiation and accommodation. This paper focuses on the contribution made in the UK by medicine. It distinguishes between two phases: Interprofessional education took root in the UK during the late 1960s, driven by developments in primary and community care. Teamwork became the cornerstone for effective collaboration as primary care centres were established, but no panacea. Relationships between professions which may have worked well enough at arms length became fraught at close quarters. GPs were enthusiastic about the work of the district nurses, but critical of health visitors whose role some failed to understand. Others understood well enough, but felt that the advice given by the health visitors was at best unnecessary and at worst ill-conceived to the point of being harmful.1,2 These women stood accused of being interfering, even officious and impertinent towards patients, giving medical advice, often incorrect or in conflict with the GP's treatment, and undermining their authority with their patients.3 As for social workers, GPs regarded them as relatively junior employees of the local authority, whose main functions were to find home helps, sort out financial problems, and rescue battered babies. Neither GPs nor health visitors thought that social workers were trustworthy. They were hard to contact and slow to take action, did not offer a 24-hour service or remain long in the same post, never made time to discuss individual cases, …