Wednesday, 7 January 2015

Late last year I was pleased to be invited to attend a conference called “Reaching the Summit: Leading the way from Interprofessional Education to Practice”. Having patients included with educators and practitioners meant that the healthcare stakeholders sitting around the table were representative of more of the members involved in the health team.

It was a little disconcerting when I looked back at the list of Summit Registrants prior to writing this post and saw that under the title and the occupation columns the patients were all listed as “Patient Guests” in both columns. That seems to imply that our place is not secure – maybe it isn’t a given that patients will always be invited to participate.

We’re making the right connections At the event a large part of the afternoon was spent in breakout sessions, each one with a patient representative. The teams were composed of people working in hospital administration, in medical education, clinicians, allied professionals and, as at the IDEO Design Challenge, the variety of opinions led to strong and useful conclusions and strategies.

At one point in the session I commented that the very words ‘inter-professional collaboration’ on their own seem to exclude patients. With that [...] continue the story