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In response to community demand, The Office of the Coordinator of Health Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Canada developed a two-day Interprofessional Team Building workshop and piloted it twice. The workshops included faculty and students with clinical experience from nine different health and human service programmes. The design of the workshop was drawn from team-building theory and exercises used in business education. It was augmented by clinical examples and case-based discussions. The purposes of the workshop were: to expand a student's knowledge of other disciplines, to develop skills that enable optimal performance within a team, and to provide an opportunity for students from a variety of disciplines to learn from and about each other. The workshops were highly successful and provide a model for introducing interprofessional education into traditionally segregated university curricula.

A room-temperature-precipitable, activated terpolymer consisting of N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAAm)/N-n-butylacrylamide(nBAAm)/N-acryloxysuccinimide (NASI) (LCST = 7-13 degrees C) at a monomer feed ratio of 60:40:2.5, respectively, was prepared and conjugated to an antibody. The conjugate was evaluated in a novel cellulose acetate (CA) membrane-based immunoassay which utilizes the especially strong physical attachment of the polymer to CA to bind and concentrate the polymer attached protein onto the membrane. When compared in the CA membrane immunoassay to the antibody-poly(NIPAAm) conjugate prepared via anhydrous copolymerization of NIPAAm and NASI at the monomer feed ratio of 40:1, respectively, the performance of the NIPAAm/nBAAm/NASI terpolymer was superior to that of the NIPAAm/NASI copolymer (LCST = 32 degrees C) when the studies were carried out at room temperature. However, the terpolymer and copolymer gave equivalent performance when the assay mixture was heated to 45 degrees C. These results indicate the importance of the LCST of the polymer component of the Ab-polymer conjugate to its adsorption and binding on the CA membrane.