Countries with robust primary care systems have residents in better health at lower costs. One way to achieve a more robust primary health care system is to optimize the use of inter-professional primary care (IPC) teams. IPC teams can improve health outcomes for patients with chronic and complex conditions.

This second briefing of the report series Improving Primary Health Care Through Collaboration highlights some of the major barriers to inter-professional collaboration in IPC teams. It specifically looks at those barriers to optimization that can be changed at the individual, practice, and system levels and that are relevant to the Canadian context. Although abundant literature exists on the barriers to IPC team optimization, it remains unclear as to how these barriers can be overcome.

The content presented in this briefing is based on a review of the literature on inter-professional collaboration in primary care published in the past decade.