Interprofessional practice is a model of healthcare delivery where professionals from different disciplines work together as a coordinated team, sharing decision-making and responsibility for patient care. Rather than each provider working in isolation and passing notes back and forth, interprofessional practice means a physician, nurse, pharmacist, social worker, physical therapist, and other relevant professionals actively collaborate, communicate in real time, and build care plans together.
The World Health Organization defines collaborative practice as happening “when multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds work together with patients, families, carers and communities to deliver the highest quality of care across settings.” It’s a shift from the traditional hierarchy where one professional directs and others follow.
How It Differs From Multidisciplinary Care
The terms “multidisciplinary” and “interprofessional” are often used interchangeably, but they describe meaningfully different approaches. In multidisciplinary care, several professionals each assess and treat a patient within their own discipline. A cardiologist writes orders, a dietitian creates a meal plan, a physical therapist designs an exercise program. They may never be in the same room or discuss how their individual plans interact.
Interprofessional practice collapses those silos. The team meets, discusses the patient’s full picture, and co-designs a single care plan that accounts for each professional’s expertise. Responsibilities get distributed in real time based on the patient’s evolving needs rather than following rigid role boundaries. As one primary care professional described it in an Italian study of collaborative teams: “Together, we decide on the path to take… we make decisions together.” That collective ownership of care is the defining feature.
The Four Core Competencies
The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC), a group of health professions organizations in the United States, has established a widely used framework built around four core competency areas. Each contains eight to eleven specific sub-competencies that guide training and practice.
- Values and Ethics: Team members share a commitment to patient-centered care and respect each other’s contributions, even when professional cultures or training backgrounds differ.
- Roles and Responsibilities: Each team member understands what they bring to the table and what their colleagues bring. This clarity prevents duplication, gaps in care, and turf battles.
- Interprofessional Communication: The team communicates openly, directly, and in language everyone understands. This includes structured handoffs, shared documentation, and a willingness to speak up when something seems wrong.
- Teamwork and Team-Based Practice: The group functions as a real team, not just a collection of individuals. They plan together, problem-solve together, and hold each other accountable for outcomes.
IPEC updated this framework in 2023 to reflect new research and input from seven additional member organizations that joined the collaborative. The revision aimed to better align the competencies with current realities in education, policy, and clinical practice.
What It Looks Like in Practice
In primary care, interprofessional practice often takes the form of team-based clinics where general practitioners and community nurses serve as the core pair, pulling in specialists, mental health professionals, or social workers as each patient’s situation demands. Research from Italian primary care settings found that care planning in these teams became “a more shared, iterative, and responsive process.” Rather than following a rigid protocol, professionals engaged in continuous dialogue to adjust care pathways as patients’ needs changed.
In hospitals, interprofessional collaboration commonly happens during daily rounds, where nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and therapists review each patient together. The pharmacist might flag a drug interaction the physician missed. The nurse might share that the patient has been refusing meals, prompting the dietitian to adjust their approach. The physical therapist might note that the patient isn’t safe for discharge yet. These conversations happen face to face, in real time, with everyone contributing their distinct expertise.
One German hospital studied the financial and operational impact of running a dedicated interprofessional training ward alongside conventional units. The interprofessional ward achieved lower material costs per case (about €65 less per patient, largely from reduced medication expenses) and generated roughly €1,500 more profit per case than conventional wards. Capacity utilization was higher at 87% compared to 84% on traditional units. The interprofessional ward handled more medically complex patients, which partly explains the financial difference, but the resource efficiency was notable on its own.
Effects on Clinician Burnout
About one third of clinicians in acute care settings experience emotional exhaustion, and the quality of teamwork plays a direct role. Nurses and physicians who are dissatisfied with teamwork in their unit experience more emotional exhaustion. The relationship also works in reverse: clinicians who are already burned out contribute to a decline in teamwork quality, creating a cycle that can spread through an entire unit. Research has shown that burnout can transmit from one intensive care clinician to another.
This makes early intervention important. Once emotional exhaustion takes hold, clinicians have fewer psychological resources to engage in or benefit from team training. Building strong interprofessional relationships before burnout develops is more effective than trying to repair teamwork after morale has deteriorated.
Common Barriers
Despite its benefits, interprofessional practice is difficult to implement. A cross-sectional study of 229 healthcare professionals identified the most significant obstacles. Nearly 69% of participants pointed to role and leadership ambiguity as a major barrier. When no one is sure who leads the team or where one professional’s responsibility ends and another’s begins, collaboration stalls. About 68% cited different goals among individual team members, reflecting the reality that a surgeon, a social worker, and a physical therapist may each prioritize different outcomes for the same patient.
Power dynamics ranked third, with 53% of respondents identifying differences in authority, expertise, and income as a significant obstacle. Medicine’s traditional hierarchy, where physicians hold decision-making authority and other professionals defer, doesn’t disappear just because a team adopts a collaborative model. About half of respondents also pointed to a lack of formal training in interprofessional collaboration and a lack of systems for timely information exchange.
Other barriers that surfaced across multiple studies include time constraints, resistance from professionals who are comfortable with existing workflows, lack of administrative support, professional culture clashes, and regulatory or legal concerns about shared responsibility. Funding models that reimburse individual providers rather than teams can also work against collaboration, since there’s no financial incentive to spend time in joint planning.
Who Qualifies as Part of the Team
This is a distinction worth understanding. The World Health Professions Alliance draws a clear line between interprofessional collaboration among licensed, regulated health professionals and the broader category of “health workers,” which includes community health workers and personal care aides who may operate in unregulated environments with variable training. Both groups are essential to healthcare delivery, but the relationships function differently. Collaboration between a nurse and a physician involves shared clinical decision-making among peers. Collaboration between a nurse and an unlicensed care aide involves supervision and oversight. Conflating the two, the Alliance argues, can have real consequences for care quality and patient safety.
In practice, the core of most interprofessional teams includes physicians, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, physical and occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, dietitians, and psychologists. Depending on the setting, respiratory therapists, chaplains, care coordinators, and physician assistants or nurse practitioners may also be involved. The specific composition depends on the patient population and the complexity of care being delivered.