Barriers and potentials of interprofessional planning: Creating Care Homes for People with Dementia

It is a huge challenge to interdisciplinarity that people from different subject fields have to work together and come to the same understanding. On the one hand, growing specialisation results in different subject fields that create valuable in-depth knowledge. On the other, knowledge tends to become separated in silos with different discourses and different perspectives on how to tackle new challenges; differences created during education and reinforced by working experience. For a study of inter-professional knowledge transfer, care homes for people with dementia had the advantage that they have a very complex, but at the same time well-defined problem, which definitely requires different and specialised kinds of knowledge. Inter-professionality, like interdisciplinarity, means cooperation between people from different subject fields. It requires that knowledge is transferred across professional boundaries. To do so, mental barriers against understandings and interpretations embedded in other disciplines or traditions other than one own must be lowered or removed.