Complexity and Interprofessional Education

Calls for greater collaboration between professionals in health and social care have led to pressures to move towards interprofessional education at both pre- and postregistration levels. Whilst this move has evolved out of common sense demands, such a multiple systems approach to education does not fit easily into existing traditional disciplinary frameworks and there is, as yet, no proven theoretical framework to guide its development. What is more, it lacks a clear causality and predictability and therefore does not fit easily into traditional scientific frameworks with their focus on analysis, prediction and control. This article considers how complexity theory, with its focus on connectivity, diversity, self-organization, and emergence, can provide interprofessional education with a coherent theoretical foundation, freeing it from the constraints of a traditional linear framework, enabling it to be better understood, questioned and challenged as a new paradigm of learning.