CIHC: Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative

Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice: Promotes the active participation of each health care discipline in patient care. It enhances patient and family-centred goals and values, provides mechanisms for continuous communication among caregivers, optimizes staff participation in clinical decision-making within and across disciplines and fosters respect for disciplinary contributions made by all professionals. (Health Canada 2003)

Collaborative Practice: An interprofessional process for communication and decision making that enables the knowledge and skills of care providers to synergistically influence the client/patient care provided.(Way, Jones, & Busing 2000) Collaborative practice is interlinked to the concept of teamwork.

Discipline: An academic branch of knowledge such as medicine, nursing, respiratory therapy, air traffic control, law, accounting.

Evaluations: The purpose of evaluation is to improve, not prove. (Stufflebeam, 2001). Evaluation is project specific, assessing the processes required to achieve a particular set of outcomes with the purpose of revising or refining the project (formative evaluation) and assessing whether or not a set of outcomes have been achieved (summative evaluation).

Health Caregivers: Regulated and unregulated health care providers, personal support workers, caregivers, volunteers and families who provide health care services at the organizational, practice and community levels. (HealthForce Ontario 2007)

IECPCP: Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice

Interdisciplinary: Two or more disciplines work or learn together to solve a problem or gather information. For example, medicine, pharmacy and law have to work together if a new drug is being tested for the market.

Interprofessional Education (IPE): Occurs when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care (CAIPE 2002)

NaHSSA: National Health Sciences Students’ Association

Patient: CIHC uses the term ‘patient’ to represent a variety of similar and complementary terms such as client, consumer, family, service-user.

Practice Education: Any on-location teaching environment ranging from a one-to-one training between a licensed or registered health care provider and a student in the field with or without a residency program.

Profession: An occupation, vocation or career requiring special training (for example, doctor, licensed practical nurse, respiratory therapist, air
traffic controller, lawyer, accountant).

Research: Studies that are conceptualized, designed and conducted in such a way that its findings can be generalized or extrapolated to circumstances outside of any particular project.

Team: A collection of individuals who work interdependently, share responsibility for outcomes, and see themselves and are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems (for example, business unit or corporation) and who manage their relationship across organizational boundaries. (Cohen & Bailey 1997)

Teamwork: Describes an interdependent relationship that exists between members of a team. It is an application of collaboration. “Collaboration” deals with the type of relationships and interactions that take place between coworkers. Effective health care teamwork applies to caregivers who practice collaboration within their work settings. (D’Amour, Ferrada-Videla & San Martin Rodriguez 2005)