Research into interprofessional collaboration (IPC) has predominantly focused on health care and special-ized care settings, but there is an increasing interest in interprofesssional ‘teams around the child’ in community-based settings. We conducted a realist synthesis of empirical studies into IPC between youth professionals, often in regular community settings, to explore barriers and facilitators of IPC. Included studies were coded with an elaborated scheme to chart the focus of studies and to identify moderators and context-mechanism-outcome configurations of IPC. Professional and normative integration was the main focus of the included studies. Most studies emphasized the challenges of IPC in practice, like unclear roles of self and others, lack of trust and inadequate communication. Other perceived barriers are exclud-ing others in the planning of interventions, taking ownership of plans (vs. sharing) and different modes of communication. Interprofessional education, co-location of staff, acting as a mediator in the team, organising formal and informal meetings, conflict resolutions, self-sacrifice, and conceptualizing practice were perceived as facilitators of IPC. Future IPC research into community-based settings should include all professional stakeholders and the children and their families to evaluate outcomes at both interprofes-sional and clinical level.
Sarah Banks (2012) describes ethics work mainly as the effort people put into developing themselves as good practitioners. She discerns six aspects of ethics work: identity work, framing work, reason work, emotion work, role work and performance work. Although ethics work focuses on the ethical development of individual practitioners within their profession, the concept and all its aspects can be transferred into an ethical guideline for the collective development of practitioners in interprofessional cooperation. As such the concept of collective interprofessional ethics work can also be used as a set of criteria for the ethical evaluation of interprofessional cooperation, as is shown on the basis of an experiment in Belgium
Background: The number of people suffering from one or more chronic conditions is rising, resulting in an increase in patients with complex health care demands. Interprofessional collaboration and the use of shared care plans support the management of complex health care demands of patients with chronic illnesses. This study aims to get an overview of the scientific literature on developing interprofessional shared care plans. Methods: We conducted a scoping review of the scientific literature regarding the development of interprofessional shared care plans. A systematic database search resulted in 45 articles being included, 5 of which were empirical studies concentrating purely on the care plan. Findings were synthesised using directed content analysis. Results: This review revealed three themes. The first theme was the format of the shared care plan, with the following elements: patient’s current state; goals and concerns; actions and interventions; and evaluation. The second theme concerned the development of shared care plans, and can be categorised as interpersonal, organisational and patient-related factors. The third theme covered tools, whose main function is to support professionals in sharing patient information without personal contact. Such tools relate to documentation of and communication about patient information. Conclusion: Care plan development is not a free-standing concept, but should be seen as the result of an underlying process of interprofessional collaboration between team members, including the patient. To integrate the patients’ perspectives into the care plans, their needs and values need careful consideration. This review indicates a need for new empirical studies examining the development and use of shared care plans and evaluating their effects.
