Abstract | Partnerships, multi-agency working and collaborative care have been part of government rhetoric since the 1990s, and have become part of the vocabulary and discourse of professional and interprofessional practice (e.g. Department of Health, 1998; 2000. There is an abundance of support for the inherent value of collaborative, interagency working, as the inclusion of this chapter in Professional Issues in Primary Care Nursing indicates. However, public inquiries, for example into the tragic deaths of Victoria Climbié and ‘Baby P’, continue to find failures in collaboration between practitioners, and failures in organisations and agencies that do not co-ordinate their work with each other (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2008; Laming, 2003). Nevertheless, current European Union (EU) and World Health Organisation (WHO) European Region policy mandate the need for collaborative interagency, interprofessional and inter-sectoral practice (WHO, 2006; Yan et al. 2007). |
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