Learning eastward: reframing interprofessional education through collaborative cultures.

Abstract

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been widely endorsed as essential to collaborative practice, yet decades of implementation have yielded only modest and inconsistent improvements in clinician behaviour and patient outcomes. This Reflection contends that the persistent knowledge gap reflects a deeper structural problem: educational interventions are being asked to do work that organisational and regulatory systems actively obstruct. Using comparative analysis of health systems in Asia, where interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP) has emerged as an operational necessity in high-acuity settings, we examine the conditions under which IPCP becomes embedded in everyday practice rather than confined to training programmes. The analysis points to four structural enablers warranting attention: alignment between educational and service-level expectations; clarity in task-sharing and scope-of-practice arrangements; dedicated investment in IPCP processes and time; and accountability systems sensitive to context. Addressing these enablers requires not the adoption of a single model, but a reciprocal exchange of insights across health systems with different organisational histories and cultural resources.