Integrated Team Working: You Can Get it if you Really Want it: Part I

The literature on inter-professional working has not generally yielded evidence of great success, and this has led some to lose patience with the inter-professional enterprise. This article reports the findings of an evaluation of an ambitious programme to integrate social workers, district nurses and housing officers on a locality basis in Sedgefield, County Durham. It articulates an 'optimistic model' of inter-professional collaboration and suggests that the findings of the Sedgefield evaluation offer some support for the validity of the model.