Power in interprofessional education and collaborative practice: has anything changed?

Power, which often presents itself in the form of hierarchy, is one of the most consistently identified barriers to interprofessional collaboration, yet how it operates remains comparatively undertheorized. For all that has been written about collaboration, communication, and shared decision-making in health and social care, comparatively little explanatory attention has been paid to how power actually operates between professions, why it persists, and whether it can be changed. What literature exists tends to confirm the tenacity of hierarchy through single time-point analyses of small samples, rather than offering evidence of what successful change looks like, or even whether it is achievable. This rolling themed issue of the Journal of Interprofessional Care was convened to address that gap.