Sociology of interprofessional health care practice: Critical reflections and concrete solutions

Abstract

In recent years governments around the world have been bending their will toward increasing collaborative practice amongst health care professionals. Although interprofessional learning has been on the agenda since the 1950s, to date there has been mixed success in bringing the disparate range of health professionals in the health care system together in a coherent and systematic way. Surprisingly, there has been limited sociological analysis of this phenomenon with no identifiable seminal text that critical analyses the issues facing the development of successful inter-professional practice in health. This edited collection to redress this by providing the conditions for critical engagement with inter-professional issues through developing a critical sociology of interprofessional health care practice. The core strength of the book is the meditations, case studies, evaluations and theoretical reflections on the practice of inter-professional collaboration in health by preeminent scholars from Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The book provides a sophisticated critical inquiry that uses a wide array of multi-disciplinary conceptual tools to study the phenomenon of interprofessional practice in a way that is easily understood by both instructors and students in the fields of medicine, allied health and nursing. © 2011 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.