Family health teams: can health professionals learn to work together?

OBJECTIVE

To learn what educators across the health professions involved in primary health care think about the use and development of academic family health teams to provide, teach, and model interprofessional collaboration and about the introduction of interprofessional education (IPE) within structured academic primary care.

DESIGN

Qualitative study using focus groups.

SETTING

Higher education institutions across Ontario.

PARTICIPANTS

Purposeful sample of 36 participants from nursing, pharmacy, speech language pathology, occupational and physical therapy, social work, and family medicine.

METHOD

Participants were invited to join focus groups of 6 to 8 health professionals. Themes were derived from qualitative analysis of data gathered using a grounded-theory approach.

MAIN FINDINGS

Three major themes were identified: the lack of consensus on opportunities for future academic family health teams to teach IPE, the lack of formalized teaching of interprofessional collaboration and the fact that what little has been developed is primarily for family physicians and hardly at all for other health professionals, and the confusion around the definition of IPE across health professions.

CONCLUSION

The future role of family health teams in academic primary care settings as a place for learners to see teamwork in action and to learn collaboration needs to be examined. Unless academic settings are developed to provide the necessary training for primary health care professionals to work in teams, a new generation of health care professionals will continue to work in status quo environments, and reform initiatives are unlikely to become sustainable over time.