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To review the development of interprofessional education (IPE) in the United Kingdom (UK) it is necessary to appreciate that the UK is made up of four countries: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England each with its own health and education policy although health professions are currently regulated at the UK level. For all four countries, meeting future health and social care needs is a critical need that will require the development and introduction of new roles in and across health and social care, new ways of working and as a consequence changes to the kind, content and delivery of education and training. The development and implementation of IPE in the UK therefore requires not only strategic cross-profession agreements but also understanding of the differing labour market challenges and realities within and between the four UK countries.It is evident that some progress has been made across the UK at a pre-qualifying level with the development of common learning for students from a range of health and social care professions. Programmes for qualified staff often aim to attract participants from a range of disciplines. However despite concerted efforts IPE appears still be somewhat on the margins and evidence of impact is difficult to find at scale.Rather than promoting IPE or not, maybe the questions for the next decade should be: what are the health and social care needs, what are the skills required to do this work, what therefore should the workforce look like and how should it be prepared. As Wanless (2002) noted “although the number of health care professionals is important for the capacity of the system, arguably the way the workforce is used is even more important”

Policies aimed at widening participation in higher education (HE) and diversifying the health and social care workforce have contributed to the changing profile of the pre-registration occupational therapy (OT) student population in the UK. In 2005, 67% of the intake was mature, aged 21 years or older (College of Occupational Therapists 2007), and increasing numbers are entering with ‘non-traditional’ academic backgrounds. Together with students from minority ethnic groups and working class backgrounds, this could be perceived to constitute the ‘masses’ in the UK move away from its historically elite model (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003). However, with much of the expansion in UK student numbers driven by school-leavers aged 18–21 (Elliott 2003) and those from more affluent families (Franklin 2006), participation has increased to a greater extent than it has widened. In the absence of significant challenges to the dominant hegemony, the broad HE environment has not changed dramatically, and it is evident that many of the challenges faced by students from non-traditional backgrounds stem from HE’s long-established culture, which generally remains oriented towards the traditional white middle-class student (Archer 2003).A valuable framework for exploring the experiences of students who enter HE is provided by Bourdieu’s key conceptual tools. The degree of fit between an individual student’s ‘habitus’ and their portfolio of ‘capital’ and the taken-for-granted practices and ‘rules of the game’ inherent in the new ‘field’ of HE they enter can have a marked influence on the nature of the learning experience and the learner identities they develop. These concepts underpinned the analysis of data emerging from a longitudinal, instrumental case study that explored the educational experiences of students with non-traditional academic backgrounds throughout their studies on an undergraduate OT programme within one of the UK’s research intensive universities. This paper draws on examples from amongst the study’s thirteen participants to illustrate the challenges encountered by students as they learn how to play ‘the game’ and how to present knowledge and understanding in the ‘legitimate’ form recognised and accepted by the field. It illuminates student experiences in a powerful way by highlighting the impact on learner, and even personal, identities bought to bear by varying degrees of congruence between individual habitus and the dominant culture of a specific HE institution

This paper outlines the development of a conceptual framework to guide the evaluation of the impact of the pedagogy employed in continuing professional development for professionals in education, health and social care. The work is developed as part of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Interprofessional Learning across the Public Sector (CETL: IPPS) at the University of Southampton. The paper briefly outlines the field for pedagogic research and comments on the underpinning theories that have so far been used to guide research into interprofessional learning (IPL). It maps out the development of interprofessional CPD in its specific context as part of the CETL: IPPS with its links to a local authority undergoing service reorganisation and the role of the continuing professional development (CPD) in effecting change. It then brings together a theoretical framework with the potential toexplore, explain and evaluate the essential features of the model of pedagogy used in interprofessional CPD, in which professionals from education have for the first time been included alongside those from health and social care. The framework draws upon elements of situated learning theory, Activity Theory and Dreier’s work (2002, 1999) on trajectories of participation, particularly Personal Action Potency. By combining the resulting analytic framework with an adapted version of an established evaluation model, a theoretically-driven, practicable evaluation matrix is developed. The matrix has potential use in evaluating the impact of pedagogic input on practice change. The paper models a process for developing a conceptual framework to steer pedagogic evaluation. Such a process and the resulting matrix may be of use to other researchers who are similarly developing pedagogic evaluation.

The HCIU and the School of Management undertook an empirical investigation into the impact of Leadership Development for NHS middle-management staff. The cohort was a cross-disciplinary mix of clinical and management personnel from 17 NHS organisations in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. The research focused on evaluating the impact of the development intervention on the individuals and their organisations. The aims were to identify if such an intervention changes the thinking and behaviour of staff and their organisations, without losing sight of evaluating the costs and benefits of a development programme. The framework used for the evaluation was Phillips and Phillips’ modified version of Kirkpatrick’s framework for training evaluation.The results show that the intervention had a substantial impact on the individuals taking part. The participants reported improved self-confidence, more reflective and broader thinking, a heightened sense for other people’s behaviours and actions, and some participants also reported the acquisition of useful management tools to initiate and deal with change and its inherent challenges. However, the research also showed that training and development within the NHS tends to happen haphazardly rather than as an organisation-wide coordinated action. Nearly all research participants (including line-managers of the course participants) confirmed that there are rarely any mechanisms in place to support the application or integration of newly acquired knowledge and skills once back within the working environment. This was amplified by the disintegrated approach of selection and needs analysis on an organisational level before sending individuals on the programme. As the evaluated programme was part of a WDC sponsored pilot project, the cost-benefit analysis did not deliver any significant results. However, it was clear that the lack of appropriate needs analysis contributed to the lack of potential measure to assess the usefulness and benefits of such an intervention. Based on these findings the research report produced a number of recommendations for the strategic, operational, and individual levels within an organisation.

In this paper Dr Debra Humphris and Dame Jill Macleod Clark, pioneers of the New Generation programme at Southampton University, outline the changes to the education of professionals that they believe are necessary if the healthcare workforce is to be prepared for the future. Their far-reaching recommendations highlight the need for methods of inter-professional education to be fully explored and for the wider healthcare environment to be better equipped to recieve professionals trained in new and innovative ways.