Collaborative Leadership within Interprofessional Practice

Leadership and interprofessional client-centred collaborative practice are situated so both can resonate within both health and social care students moving into practice, educators who are interested in teaching from an interprofessional perspective, and practitioners who are grappling with the desire to provide enhanced collaborative care to their clients. This chapter begins with a discussion of a selected number of leadership models and their interrelationship to interprofessional collaborative teamwork. This is followed by an exploration of the impacts of current multidisciplinary practice within the health system; traditional hierarchical and top-down decision models will be discussed. Transformations needed to create the conditions for the capacity of teams to emulate interprofessional client-centred collaborative teamwork will then be explored. A case study is provided to assist in showing how a manager can create the conditions for collaborative teamwork to develop in an institutional setting. Finally, issues in current practice environments are discussed regarding how these subjects can be presented and enacted to support collaborative leadership. Thus, leadership reflective of more participatory and shared approaches to enhancing patient outcomes will be explored. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on selected means to evaluate the effectiveness of interprofessional collaborative team leadership.