For the purpose of this document, Interprofessional is defined as:

Multiple health disciplines with diverse knowledge and skills who share an integrated set of goals and who utilize interdependent collaboration that involves communication, sharing of knowledge and coordination of services to provide services to patients/clients and their care-giving systems.

This best practice guideline, Developing and Sustaining Interprofessional Health Care: Optimizing patients/clients, organizational, and system outcomes is intended to foster healthy work environments. The focus in developing this guideline was identifying attributes of interprofessional care that will optimize quality outcomes for patients/clients, providers, teams, the organization and the system.

This guideline identifies best practices to enable, enhance and sustain teamwork and interprofessional collaboration, and to enhance positive outcomes for patients/clients, systems and organizations. It is based on the best available evidence; where evidence was limited, the recommendations were based on the consensus of expert opinion.