Interprofessional education and teamworking: a view from the education providers

Based on a presentation from the Millennium Festival of Medicine

There will be new joint training across the professions in communication skills and in NHS principles and organisation. They will form part of a new core curriculum for all education programmes for NHS staff…. A new common foundation programme will be put in place to enable students and staff to switch careers and training paths more easily.1

We believe it is important that the NHS … should work with higher education providers and accreditation bodies … to develop education and training arrangements which are genuinely multi-professional and which will enable students to transfer readily between courses without having to start their training afresh.2

These bold—and wholly laudable—statements are taken from two major documents published in the year 2000 on the future of the health service. The strength of the statements, and their inclusion within these two important documents, highlights the central role now being accorded to ideas of multiprofessional and inter-professional education in the development of the “new” NHS.

How is this to be delivered? To deliver on these aspirations, the NHS depends wholly on the ability of the education providers—universities and higher education colleges— to comprehend, embrace, and then provide interprofessional training. It is important therefore that education providers are an active part of this debate.