The ascent of Mt. Everest

Earlier this Spring, I reread the account of the 1924 attempt of Mallory and Irvine to summit the highest mountain in the world, Mt. Everest. Apart from the recurring mystery of whether the English climbers actually achieved their goal before disappearing on the upper reaches of the mountain, what emerged for me were the many failed attempts (including two earlier ones of their own) before the summit was finally conquered by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. This put me in mind of the current efforts to once more try to implement the concept of interprofessional education and teamwork in the solution to our many problems in delivering quality health care to all our citizens. The recurring calls in every recent report on health care by the Institute of Medicine and other national groups for greater implementation of collaborative practice models and interprofessional education (IPE) have reawakened the hope that this time, at last, we might succeed. But looming over the horizon, like the storm clouds constantly shrouding the summit of Everest, are the oft-dashed hopes that resurfaced throughout the last century; such that the course of IPE and IPP (interprofessional practice) often has been described as one of successive cycles of "boom and bust."