ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two specific areas of interprofessional communication: health care teams and medical interpreters. It examines two differing perspectives on how interprofessional communication operates in health care teams. Healthcare itself has a traditional medical hierarchy that presents a number of problems to effective interprofessional communication. A number of studies have noted the positive impact of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary forms of interprofessional communication in end-of-life care. In terms of metatheoretical assumptions about interprofessional communication, there are two primary ways in which communication is assumed to operate in teams: as information exchange and as the construction of meaning. Given the high degree of change in healthcare overall and in healthcare organizations, the authors should better understand how interprofessional communication operates using process theories. This approach would allow us to understand how the process of interprofessional communication unfolds in health care teams, as well as the factors that influence these processes.
