Interprofessional Practice Essay

1202 Words3 Pages

Using examples involving human service workers, discuss how interprofessional practice is defined. Discuss the barriers to interprofessional practice and how these might be addressed. Interprofessional practice is essentially the collaboration of multi-disciplinary professionals to achieve a common client-centred goal and in doing so, better assist with the complexity of the clients’ challenges (Chenoweth & McAuliffe, 2015, McCallin, 2014). Whilst the ability to work in partnership with other professionals is essential in creating the best outcomes for a wide variety of client care (Pecukonis, Doyle, & Bliss, 2008), social workers face a range of boundaries that may limit their ability to work coherently, including miscommunication, lack …show more content…

The tragic story of Veronica Climbie is an unfortunate example that highlights the impact that not only unprofessional practice but what miscommunication amongst disciplines can have on the life of a client, in this case, a young and innocent little girl. The Veronica Climbie Inquiry (lord lamming, 2003) was established after the tragic and preventable death of a young abuse victim in the UK caused an understandable amount of outrage and consequent reassessment of the functioning and protocol of many multi-disciplinary domains related to her untimely death. In the report, Lamming makes numerous recommendations to improve the child protection sector and prevent unnecessary deaths like Veronicas from happening again, one of these such recommendations is the need to enhance communication between the many disciplines involved with the complex issue of child abuse and protection, and the need for agencies to take accountability of their workers, their decisions and their actions within this context. It is unfortunate that the death of an innocent child had to be the catalyst for positive change and development within multi-disciplinary practice, nonetheless , we can see that a push in policy to create a greater structure for accountability and communication in complex social issues that require interprofessional collaboration can help us overcome these negligent and potentially detrimental barriers of

Open Document