Linking social work agency perspectives on interprofessional education into a school of nursing and midwifery.

Recent policy documents have highlighted the importance of developing interprofessional education to support interprofessional practice. In particular improving communication between health and social care agencies has been highlighted as an educational and practice priority. This study set out to explore the interprofessional training needs of social work practitioners with social work agencies in North East London to ensure that the interprofessional courses were relevant to social work. Findings from 15 qualitative interviews with key health and social care professionals in eight London boroughs will be presented. The findings suggest that there is great diversity in the budgets, resources and approaches taken to post qualifying training across the boroughs and between agencies and that training needs analysis for experienced practitioners is at an early stage of development workforce planning to the commissioning of education. Social work services identified bespoke training and the accreditation of their existing programmes as important. Responding to rapid organizational change and immediate training needs was a key priority in the services interviewed. However, limited funding to release social workers to take up interprofessional post-qualifying training remains a constraint for training officers, and how training was planned and organized by both practitioners and providers was considered important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]