Towards an evolution of interprofessional practice: Lessons learned from two jazz piano trios

Highlights • Interprofessional practice has been slow to take hold in healthcare. • There was a similar interprofessional transition in jazz music in the early 1960s. • Lessons learned from jazz history can inform today’s interprofessional healthcare.
Interprofessional practice has been of great interest to both health systems and educational institutions, but has been slow to develop in actual practice. Important efforts to speed adoption have mostly focused on changes in structure or educational interventions. It turns out that the field of jazz music was grappling with similar issues in the early 1960s. In this essay, we draw lessons from the experiences of jazz musicians during a time of transition. We conclude that significant cultural transformation, focused on two paradoxes, and the barriers and contexts that flow from them, will be necessary to achieve ideal interprofessional healthcare practice.