Relational learning and interprofessional practice: transforming health education for the 21st century

Theories and traditions emphasizing the centrality of caring have guided the evolution of the healthcare professions. In contemporary practice, creating a therapeutic context in which healing can occur relies not just on the caring dispositions of individual clinicians, but also on the collective relational capacities of interprofessional healthcare teams. This article describes the intersection and complementarity of relational and interprofessional learning approaches to health education, provides exemplars of shared learning models and discusses the benefits and obstacles to integrating relational and interprofessional philosophies into real world practice.