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“An older woman spent all morning in a day centre trying to find someone who could help fix her fire but none of the staff knew who to contact.”

This example was used to show the problems of interprofessional boundaries by Brenda Gillies from the University of Dundee.

Gillies and her colleagues from the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education have been pioneering a project to improve interprofessional learning.

She said that the project had been well received and increased the knowledge of other professions. But she added that there was no adequate evidence that interprofessional training improved social work.

But delegates queried the benefits of the training. One teacher said that her students were resistant to work with other health professionals because “nurses have different values from us”. Another said that instead of concentrating on the work of other professionals, social workers should be concentrating on their own values and training.