The paper is co-authored by a multidisciplinary team headed by Dr. John Riva, a chiropractor and faculty member at the McMaster University School of Medicine.  Its premise springboards from the recent World Health Organization’s recognition of the necessity for including interprofessional education within the training of health care professionals.  The team suggests that chiropractic training institutions should adopt shadowing in a multidisciplinary clinical setting to facilitate indepth learning regarding the roles and methods of practitioners in other disciplines.  To lend support for the ideas for interprofessional education that the authors purport in this paper, as well as to demonstrate that other professions are also active in implementing interprofessional education strategies, similar learning initiatives in the areas of pharmacy and medicine are described. 

The authors review a variety of learning models, structures and goals for interprofessional education during training and describe how these can be made relevant to chiropractic students as well as how chiropractic can be taught to students in other disciplines through shadowing experiences.  

The authors seem motivated, throughout the paper, to harness interprofessional education in order to bring about seamless interdisciplinary, patient-centred care in practice, both by chiropractors as well as by practitioners in other disciplines.  The paper points out a lack, within the chiropractic literature, of syntheses of interdisciplinary experiences and adds to its salient recommendations a suggestion that more of these should be undertaken within the profession. 

To view a provisional abstract and/or pdf of this paper, click on http://www.chiroandosteo.com/content/pdf/1746-1340-18-31.pdf