Interprofessional and intraprofessional teamwork and handovers in healthcare: challenges and recommendations from work-based learning

Interprofessional practice is a well-known topic for all public and private health professionals, but there has been limited research on social network analysis in determining the actual configuration of professional networks and their impact on teamwork and patient care. Furthermore, previous interprofessional theories appear limited to specific sectors and are not generalisable. The book’s authors propose novel insiders’ views about collaborative practice as ‘experts’ of the sector, with plenty of applications that can attract healthcare professionals and policymakers aiming to improve integrated care based on Evidence-Based Practice and Practice-Based Evidence.

Several aspects of interdisciplinary and interprofessional teamwork appeared as the lever for patient improvement, quality of care, team coordination, and work satisfaction. In practice and education, interprofessional cooperation is the meeting, interacting, learning, communicating and practising of people from two or more different professional backgrounds with the customer as the care centre (Prentice et al., 2015). Additionally, reciprocal communication and comprehension of each professional’s role are believed to lead to better care coordination (Prentice et al., 2015). In this book we focussed our research on healthcare teams in public and private hospitals and healthcare settings where we worked or researched. This book demonstrates how we applied our learning experiences to such groups. Even from our early practice in hospitals and healthcare settings, we have observed that only integrated and interprofessional teams can deliver an adequate quality of care to patients. These last also are part of the interprofessional network, which addresses the central topic of patients’ needs.