Professional Regulation and Interprofessional Collaboration in Occupational Therapy

Abstract

Interprofessional collaboration, an important enabler of high-quality care, involves a team-based approach to treatment where health professionals from separate disciplines develop cohesive cultures and collaborative behaviours. The goal of this dissertation was to describe how health profession regulatory models influence interprofessional collaboration (IPC) for Occupational Therapists in Ontario through three interrelated studies – a scoping review, comparative case study, and institutional ethnography. This dissertation proposes a framework for describing the characteristics of health profession regulatory models, recommends how multi-profession models of health profession regulation can influence consistency in IPC expectations across professions, and identifies provincial and health profession regulator policies that enable and create barriers to IPC. This paper concludes that IPC has not been a sufficient priority within contemporary regulatory frameworks and therefore it serves as an important area for future policy development, particularly as governments embark on regulatory reform.