ABSTRACT
Inter-professional education and practice in the United States is a relatively new venture, especially outside the health care team concept. Its origins in the health care arena are usually traced to Cherasky and his work with the team home care concept at the Montefiore Hospital in 1948 (Cherasky 1949). Additional early influences are found in the Family Health Maintenance Program of George Silver, also at Montefiore (Silver 1963). Baldwin reminds us in his remarkable article, comparing the development of health care teams in Britain and the United States, that there was also a clinical health care team programme which began at the University of Washington’s Child Health Center in Seattle in the late 1940s. It included paediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, social workers, dentists, dental hygienists and medical technologists, together with students from each of these fields (Baldwin 1982: 5). Baldwin points out, however, that the model for these early programmes in team health care delivery was the ‘Peckham Experiment’ at London’s Pioneer Health Centre in the 1920s.
