Collaboration and Ethics

Interprofessional collaboration includes relationships and decision making among health professionals, patients, families, and communities. Because its aim of high-quality care is consistent with acting in the best interest of patients, interprofessional collaboration is inherently ethical. Ethical knowledge is an important guidepost for interprofessional education, behaviors, and decision making. Interprofessional collaboration, however, also requires awareness of the impact of culture, context, emotion, disciplinary values and beliefs, and legal-centric views on the provision of ethical interprofessional, patient-centred care and on interprofessional relationships. This chapter discusses integration of ethics within interprofessional collaboration and decision making. Consideration is given to ethical theoretical frameworks and concepts and their application within interprofessional relationships and collaboration, as well as to the global predominance of traditional Western bioethics and informed consent and their limitations in selected cultural contexts.