Interprofessional Communication in Health and Social Care

This is an Open Access book. Interprofessional communication remains both under-theorized and under-researched in healthcare contexts. This book aims to fill that gap by offering practitioners, policy makers, interprofessional curriculum builders, and students in the health professions a broadened theoretical understanding and rich empirical examples of interprofessional communication across a range of health and social care contexts. Importantly, this means opening the black box of what it means for interprofessional collaboration to be “effective,” in particular, for complex, collective practices that rely on shared meanings and accountabilities. Divided into three parts, the book brings together the practical and conceptual expertise of scholars and practitioners from the fields of communication, interprofessional education, health and human sciences, and healthcare management. Stephanie Fox has studied interprofessional communication and collaboration in healthcare contexts for over 15 years. Her work focuses on collective sensemaking, narrative, leadership, team communication, and the navigation of professional hierarchies in collaborative interactions. Kirstie McAllum’s research focuses on patterns of collaborative and conflict-laden communication when groups with varied or contested professional statuses work together (e.g., volunteers/paid staff; family caregivers/healthcare professionals; frontline personal careworkers/healthcare workers with specialist training). Leena Mikkola has studied interpersonal communication both in client-provider and workplace relationships in social and health care contexts for over 15 years. Recently, her research interest has been in health care management teams and interprofessional health care teams.