My Lords, I shall make a brief intervention in support of the desire of my noble friend Lord Rea to draw our attention to the importance of interprofessional education if we are to develop health and social care staff’s mutual respect, understanding and knowledge of each other’s professions that will bring about the collaboration, joint working and integration of care and support that we need. My noble friend describes this as staff knowing “how the other half lives”—in other words, staff knowing about each other’s services and how they operate, and being
aware of boundaries, interdependence on achieving outcomes and competing agendas. He commends IPE because it provides an established model of collaboration and co-operation on the ground.
The amendment refers back to our earlier debate on integration and the need for multidisciplinary teamworking, and it will also be relevant to the debate that we will come to shortly on the importance of continuing professional development for healthcare workers. It adds promoting the use of joint IPE for clinical and social care staff as a matter that HEE must have regard to in relation to its responsibility for promoting the integration of healthcare and health-related provision.
My noble friend helpfully sent me a considerable amount of background information on his amendment in which, as a former HR professional, I was genuinely interested. It included extensive research by the Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education, which my noble friend referred to, supporting the effectiveness of interprofessional education and training. My noble friend also referred to discussions between CAIPE and Health Education England to explore HEE’s role in taking IPE forward and embedding it in professional curricula. This is to be welcomed. Two-thirds of UK universities with two or more undergraduate programmes in health and social care include IPE, so these discussions will be helpful. These programmes cover a wide range of professions, including nursing, social work, physiotherapy, pharmacy, clinical psychology and radiography—all professions that are increasingly required to work flexibly across different care settings as part of multidisciplinary teams.
The Nuffield Trust evaluation of the first year of the inner north-west London integrated pilot that I referred to earlier underlined the importance of staff in multiprofessional teams having a high level of commitment to the pilot as a key factor in improving collaboration across different parts of the local health and care system. However, the evaluation also reminds us of the international evidence that integrated care takes years to develop and that a minimum of three to five years is needed to show impact in relation to patient experience and outcomes. Culture change, moving from silo to collaborative working among professionals, is a slow process, however committed we are to trying to make it work. I look forward to the Minister’s response to my noble friend’s amendment.