Book Review
Collaborative care: interprofessional, interagency and interpersonal
Sally Hornby
ISBN: 0 632 03725 3; 1993; 188 pages; Blackwell Scientific Publications Oxford;
Fran Sutton
University of South Australia, Adelaide SA
This is a good size book for shelves and library stacks, is well bound for durability, the print is readable, page presentation is well laid out, good quality paper is used and diagrams are easy to read. It has a relatively short index which well illustrates the range of issues discussed within the book. In addition, Hornby has included a glossary and also a series of further readings.
Sally Hornby has extensive experience working in the community and it is from this that she draws her motivation to write this new text. Her experience and background enable her to bring a richness of examples from which others can learn. Hornby has not written for a specific discipline but rather for the range of disciplines and health workers functioning in the community and for those who wish to understand community work better.
Collaborative activity in health care has been a long established philosophic underpinning to the range of community services, however, achieving collaboration in health care has long been assumed on the premise that if people work together then their work must be collaborative. However, all of us have experienced situations which indicate collaboration between health professionals is difficult to achieve and in some instances may prove almost impossible. We can all also recognize how important, valuable and cost effective such care can be for the client and for the professionals who work in such ways.
Sally Hornby also recognizes the problems inherent in such work and, in this book, identifies the problems associated with establishing and maintaining collaborative care and offers a variety of means to understand and resolve them. It is this emphasis on exploring collaborative relationships between health professionals that provides the major focus and emphasis of the book. However, current writings within this field suggest that the client forms the central tenet of such work and that while collaboration between health workers is expeditious in terms of 'getting things done' it is far more effective to concentrate on collaborating with the client. Writers in this area however, place little emphasis on fully exploring this latter range of relationships. Hornby, while addressing this issue in two chapters in her book, fails to give this the degree of attention required.
In summary, Hornby uses a systems based and psychodynamic approach to exploring collaborative care and concentrates on the notion of collaboration as its occurs, or could occur, between health professionals. While some attention is focused on the need to collaborate with the client, this is minimal. Consequently, the book is not recommended for use on its own for students but should be seen as one which provides a discussion of a number of baseline concepts. Experienced practitioners in this area would find the book interesting and informative.
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