Purpose & Scope

Purpose:

• This best practice guideline, Developing and Sustaining Interprofessional Health Care: Optimizing patients/clients, organizational, and system outcomes is intended to foster healthy work environments.
• The focus in developing this guideline was identifying attributes of interprofessional care that will optimize quality outcomes for patients/ clients, providers, teams, the organization and the system.

Scope:

• This guideline identifies best practices to enable, enhance and sustain teamwork and interprofessional collaboration, and to enhance positive outcomes for patients/clients, systems and organizations.

• It is based on the best available evidence; where evidence was limited, the recommendations were based on the consensus of expert opinion.

Target Audience:

• The target audience includes nurses and health-care professionals in all roles and practice settings, including interprofessional team members; non-nursing administrators at the unit, organizational and system level; clinical nurses; students; educators; researchers; policy makers and governments; professional organizations, employers, labour groups; and federal, provincial and territorial standard-setting bodies.