Interdisciplinary Challenges to Inter Professional Practice

Today, recognition of the importance of IPP is almost universal. The alleged benefits of IPP are manifold. But so are the challenges. The reasons for this are twofold. The first is ethical and directly related to the professional status of IPP team members. Different professions embrace a different ethical commitment, a different ethos, a different set of values and norms that guides the practice. Thus, members of different health professions may have very different ideas about what is beneficial for the patient and what constitutes harm. They may even disagree about what is normal, what pathological, and what qualifies as a disease. The second reason is epistemic in nature: Different health professions are distinguished from one another by their different types of knowledge. Appreciation of the distinct disciplinary expertise that other professionals bring when developing a care plan for a patient is a necessary condition to achieve IPP. Equally important is acknowledging that one’s own, discipline-specific knowledge is limited. But such acknowledgment may not suffice to achieve IPP. For it does not annul the fact that the knowledge contributed by team members arises out of different epistemic frameworks and consequently the members of an IPP team may feel that each other member is speaking a different foreign language. Overcoming these ethical and epistemic differences is not easy. In this chapter we recommend that members of an IPP team always focus on the one person who is not a professional but in-between all professions, that is, the patient. IPP members should layer their different perspectives on, and understandings of the patient, so that by looking through all of these layers at once, a much richer, more detailed, and ultimately more reliable understanding of the patient can be attained than any single professional can achieve.