Integrated Team Working: You Can Get it if you Really Want it: Part I.

The literature on inter-professional working has not generally yielded evidence of great success, and this has led some to lose patience with the interprofessional enterprise. This article reports the findings of an evaluation of an ambitious programme to integrate social workers, district nurses and housing officers on a locality basis in Sedgefield, County Durham. It articulates an 'optimistic model' of inter-professional collaboration and suggests that the findings of the Sedgefield evaluation offer some support for the validity of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]