Interprofessional education and medical libraries: Partnering for success

摘要

Interprofessional Education and Medical Libraries: Partnering for Success is a 10-chapter book offering theoretical and practical advice on working in the new paradigm of interprofessional education. The idea of interprofessional education is not new in the medical profession. In fact, the concept has been around for quite some time. The newest name for this type of training is Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and is the merger of teams using professionals such as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, pharmacists, social workers, and other allied health professionals which has existed in some form for the past 40 years. Interprofessional education "occurs when two or more professions learn with, from, and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care."1 The thought process is that to treat patients under medical care, teams of individuals should be working together, not in professional silos, to give patients the best care possible. Also included are examples, one from the University of Utah, to show how interprofessional education teams can work together to learn with and from each other. A second example, from the University of Florida, uses its program "Putting Families First" as another concrete prototype to bring together first-year students from six University of Florida Health Science Center colleges to work together in interdisciplinary teams on projects with real world implications. Another chapter addresses how interprofessional education teams can work together to enhance patient safety. This chapter, "Interprofessional Education and Patient Care: Supporting Patient Safety," combines the theoretical underpinnings of practice with examples of other institutions combining teams to work toward the goal of improving patient safety at their respective institutions. Next, the University of Mississippi outlines its program that brings together constituents from the Medical Center and the Rowland Library to form a new collaboration using interprofessional education. Another example of interprofessional education is when librarians are included as part of clinical rounding, becoming part of a medical team, known as clinical medical librarians, or CMLs. Extensive documentation of this type of librarianship is shared from institutions around the world. Finally, a chapter dedicated to assessing the outcomes of interprofessional education in practice are shared with readers. Each chapter includes extensive documentation and citations of the theoretical and practical. This book is highly recommended for medical libraries, academic medical libraries and hospital libraries.