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Rising to the Challenge

Seldom has an address to an interprofessional gathering been as riveting as that by Dr Leslie Ramsammy, Minister for Health for Guyana and Past-President of the World Health Assembly, to the second Collaboration across Boards conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia in May 2009: his dream of longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives for all; his challenge to redress injustice and inequality between rich and poor; his plea to redeploy human resources to improve health care systems in developing countries; his call for a collaborative workforce; his insistence on a response from the western world. The interprofessional movement can and will respond within the ‘Framework for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice’ presented to the WHO to be showcased shortly in this Journal. How to apply hard-won experience in developed to developing countries may become clearer once readers have digested and debated strategies and recommendations within that framework, but we in the west (most readers of this Journal) must first listen and learn. Easily said: less easily done, when resources in developing countries to evaluate projects are constrained, outlets for publication few and opportunities to meet western colleagues during international conferences the exception. This Journal will look afresh at what it can do towards surmounting those barriers to help translate aspirations for closer collaboration into action, beginning in this issue. Alireza Irajpour devises and tests a methodology to locate examples of ‘‘shared learning’’ in Iran amongst which he is able to identify those with interprofessional characteristics. His findings are encouraging: congruence between policy maker and practising teachers in their support for interprofessional education, informed by enough examples on which to build in a country, confirmed by WHO sources, to be making rapid strides to improve healthcare education and delivery. Developments reported from Nepal bear even closer comparisons with those in the west where Krishna and Sharada Regim found pre-licensure medical and nursing students positive regarding their experiencing interprofessional learning introduced in response to recommendations made in a Nepalese/WHO report, taking into account blurring of practice boundaries between the two professions. The next two papers address drug abuse in different countries and from different perspectives. Muhammad Tahir calls for systematic evaluation of collaborative initiatives to tackle the worsening situation in his native Pakistan, for a policy response, for coordination between government departments and for a lead academic institution. Mary Arevian reports one such initiative in the Lebanon training young people as peer-group health educators with promising results. The final paper introduces original insights into interprofessional relations which resonate far beyond Singapore. Homophily – the tendency to seek out those who are similar – is not Journal of Interprofessional Care, March 2010; 24(2): 129–130