Interprofessional Education – a potential bridge over the commissioner–provider divide?

English health and social care policy has moved to a commissioning model in which public sector bodies are responsible for developing mixed provider markets that can respond to current and future needs. Underpinning this model is an assumption that commissioners will be able to use their position as monopoly purchasers to ensure both quality and efficiency from providers. In reality though their power to achieve change in health care in particular has been limited, due to a combination of market dominance by key providers, insufficient contracting capacity and the destabilizing effects of frequent restructuring. Thus it can be argued that health care commissioning has had little positive impact as yet, but has acted to introduce additional boundaries connected with separate purchaser-provider organizations, different commissioning approaches between health and social care, and the emergence of a new ‘profession’ of commissioning to add to current inter-professional conflicts. To address the inter-organizational barriers within the new English system a range of strategic initiatives have or are being introduced, including a ‘duty’ on statutory health and social care bodies to promote integration, a new board within each locality to co-ordinate integrated commissioning and develop a shared plan to respond to identified need, and the development of national indicators that reflect on patient and service users’ experience of integrated services. Whilst clearly relevant, arguably these initiatives do not directly address barriers to integrated which may result from the key strategic players coming from different professional backgrounds. Such inter-professional issues are well-established in relation to clinical practice, and there is the potential for them to also be present at a strategic level. Based on a pilot programme, this article reflects on the presence of such barriers at a strategic level and the potential of inter-professional education (IPE) to be a means to enable commissioners and providers to work collaboratively on shared priorities. Theory & Methods: The Integrated Care Development Programme (ICDP) brought together teams of commissioners, provider managers, and senior clinicians to work on a local priority for integration. Based on principles and theories of IPE the programme was a mixture of taught content relating to integrated working and group work in which the locality teams used the theory