When health professionals collaborate rather than operating in silos, everyone benefits – patients, families and the health system at large. This is a fact supported by ample research evidence. The professionals reap the benefits, too: staff satisfaction and retention are improved through collaboration. But in the real world, health professionals and departments often slip into silo mentalities. And silos in healthcare, as US cardiologist Laurence Sparling writes, are bad for healthcare.
The “cure”, Sparling argues, is integrated healthcare with “cross-silo dialogue” – collaborative healthcare. But collaboration is a skill that has to be taught. People don’t automatically know how to work in teams. Instead, they have to develop the competencies to do so. Where better to start than in the professional training they receive? We are lecturers in the Interprofessional Education Unit at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. For two years, we tracked the development of students doing the first-year interprofessional theoretical module called Primary Health Car