Book review
Title: Interprofessional education and training
Authors: John Carpenter and Helen Dickinson
Year: 2008
Edition: 1
Number of pages: 152
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 9781847420329
Price: £12.99
Reviewer: Pauline Noden, Social Work Educator
Review date: 23/10/2008
Table of contents and more information
This book is part of the “Better Partnership Working” series edited by Jon Glasby and Helen Dickinson, which aims to provide short, accessible, but none the less evidence based and theoretically robust “how to” guides. The books cross-reference to each other, but can also be used as “stand alone”.
I was particularly interested in this one on interprofessional education (IPE, defined as “occasions when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care” (CAIPE 1997)) because I had to design and run a module of IPE from 2004-7. At that time there was some helpful guidance from writers such as Barr (2002), but little in the way of evaluation of the effectiveness of IPE in improving the quality of care for service users.
The authors are both eminent in this field and have both participated in designing and evaluating IPE in universities. The book is aimed at and has helpful recommendations for; policy makers, managers in HEIs, staff involved in planning IPE programmes, programme facilitators including service users and carers, evaluators and students on both pre and post qualifying programmes. Although the back of the book states it should be a core text for students on IPE programmes, I think it is more useful for the other categories of reader and more likely to be appreciated by post qualifying than pre qualifying students.
This book is a gold mine for anyone needing to design a programme of IPE, argue for resources to do so, find the tools to evaluate it effectively and have realistic expectations. I found it stronger on university based programmes than work-based learning. A brief historical context is given along with a chapter on “hot topics”. It summarises the evaluations of IPE programmes, which have burgeoned in the last few years, in enough detail to be useful in planning future programmes. The key elements for beneficial IPE are identified and the authors are honest about negative effects which can occur. Reflective exercises throughout aid learning. In addition to excellent references, there were details of where to obtain evaluation tools and the properties of each.
One small criticism is that they recommend the government makes IPE mandatory for all professional pre qualifying training, but suggest employers and education providers should find the money to deliver it. When the social work degree was instigated service user involvement and multi-professional working were identified as two of the key stones, yet ring fenced funding, via the GSCC, was only provided for the former. (There is no ring fenced funding for either in nurse education.) From experience, service user involvement has “taken off” much more effectively in social work education than in nursing and certainly more than IPE so, I suspect the incentive of government funding would facilitate implementation of IPE more effectively than government orders!
This book is pocket sized, clearly written, would have saved me falling into a few pitfalls and fulfils its brief.
References
Barr, H. (2002) Interprofessional education today, yesterday and tomorrow: A review. London: Learning and Teaching Support Network, Centre for Health Sciences and Practice.
CAIPE (Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education) (1997) Interprofessional education : A definition, London: CAIPE