Interprofessional Collaboration and Interprofessional Education Interventions in Clinical Healthcare Settings: A Realist Review

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) and interprofessional education (IPE) are two concepts that have gained interest during the last decade, for the positive change they enable, especially in clinical healthcare settings. Despite this surge of attention, there are few studies that systematically analyse interventions aiming at fostering IPC/IPE within clinical teams. Developing additional knowledge around factors that impact the efficiency of similarly targeted interventions can help improve the quality of patient care in clinical settings. To this end, the paper offers a systematic, realist review of the IPC/IPE interventions outlined in the literature, seeking to better understand how the context and mechanisms which shape these interventions interact to produce the desired outcomes (ie, improve IPC). Electronic databases searched were PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Web of Science. Seventeen articles met the inclusion criteria and were analysed independently by two reviewers following the RAMESES guidelines. The authors propose an explanatory model for the interventions examined and a conceptual framework that can be used as a starting point for the study of effective IPC/IPE interventions within clinical settings. Finally, this realist review highlights discrepancies in the terminology and methodology used to study similar cases, which will need to be systematically tackled by future research to further our understanding of those cases and of key elements of IPC/IPE in clinical working groups.