World Health Day 20227 April 2022by Trevor Gore, Associate Director, ICW
It is not only at a government/country level that collaboration is essential for health, but interprofessional collaboration is needed to deliver on the ground support and the last 2 years of the pandemic has shown that this not always happening. The WHO defines Interprofessional Collaboration in Healthcare as "multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds working together with patients, families, carers (caregivers), and communities to deliver the highest quality of care". However, we have seen in recent years that often poor communication, siloed thinking, lack of data sharing and fear of 'speaking out' frequently hinder the delivery of optimal health care. The WHO Lists the following benefits of interprofessional collaboration in healthcare:
It is not difficult to see where all these fit in the ICW's 8-steps approach, and here at the ICW we have begun to connect with varying health care organisations to offer support and possibilities of working together. The latest iteration of the NHS long-term plan has introduced the concept of Provider Collaboratives which "will help meet our health and social care challenges as part of new NHS thinking enabled by legislation and accelerated by COVID". There is also acknowledgment that there is no one-size-fits-all model, but successful collaborations follow good governance guiding principles, which must be a great starting place for the ICW. Since the pandemic broke, one group of healthcare professionals has been at the forefront of delivering healthcare, vaccinations and treatments, and that is the community pharmacists. They stayed open and were often the only source of healthcare in many localities. The International Pharmacist Federation (FIP) is an umbrella organisation that supports pharmacists around the World, and the ICW has made contact with a view to working together and developing joint collaboration plans. |