How is interprofessional communication researched and defined in healthcare? A scoping review protocol

Abstract

Introduction

Poor communication between healthcare professionals is one of the main causes of medical errors. Many articles about interprofessional communication (IPC) do not define what communication is and often describe it only as a domain of competencies of interprofessional collaboration. Three communication paradigms coexist: the transmission model, the transactional model and the constitutive model. These models focus on different aspects of communication and are complementary. No review about IPC, including all healthcare professionals or all healthcare settings, has been found.

Methods and analysis

A scoping review protocol was developed to map the research on the topic of IPC, the paradigms of communication used by the researchers, as well as to clarify the definition of this concept. We will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) extension for scoping reviews. Eligibility criteria follow the Population, Concept, Context framework. Articles about health professionals, allied health professionals and social workers and students in these fields will be included. Articles evaluating IPC in healthcare, either quantitatively or qualitatively, will be included. Articles investigating IPC in any type of healthcare setting in any country will be considered. All types of published articles in scientific journals will be included. The databases that were searched are MEDLINE, CINAHL, APA PsycINFO, EMBASE and Web of Science. In October 2025, 22 798 citations were retrieved, of which 9722 duplicates were deleted. Two researchers will then independently assess the remaining 13 078 citations against the eligibility criteria. This step is scheduled for completion in May 2026. They will then chart the data using a standardised data extraction tool.

Ethics and dissemination

Formal ethical approval is not required, as primary data will not be collected in this study. Findings of the scoping review will be disseminated through professional networks, conference presentations and publication in a scientific journal.

PROSPERO registration details

Because the study is a scoping and not a systematic review, registration was not possible on PROSPERO. The study was registered on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/dyh2a.

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY.

• Thanks to its broad eligibility criteria, this review will include all health professionals and contexts, providing a comprehensive overview of research on interprofessional communication in healthcare.

• This review follows a strong methodology informed by the methodological guidelines from the Joanna Briggs Institute and the adaptation of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses for Scoping Review (PRISMA-ScR) statement.

• Because it is a scoping review, the study results will mostly be descriptive, without an analysis of the risk of bias. Therefore, no recommendations based on the studies (eg, for the best way to teach or improve interprofessional communication) will be made.

• Because the study will only include published literature, it is subject to publication bias and will only reflect how interprofessional communication is defined in published articles (and not by all the health community).

Introduction

General context

Communication between healthcare professionals has been identified as a major cause of medical errors, which are estimated to be the third leading cause of death in the USA after heart disease and cancer, causing approximately 251 000 deaths per year in the USA alone.1,3 Communication errors are also one of the main causes of serious adverse events in healthcare institutions in France and the USA.^{4 5} Interprofessional communication (IPC) skills as well as team-level collaboration are positively associated with professional fulfilment, which in turn mitigated burnout among healthcare professionals.⁶

Interprofessionality in health

Due to the impact of medical errors, researchers and institutions are interested in the way healthcare professionals work together, that is, interprofessionality. It is important to consider how interprofessionality is conceptualised, as this influences how it is researched and implemented in clinical practice.

Health interprofessionality is defined as ‘the development of a cohesive practice between professionals from different disciplines. It is the process by which professionals reflect on and develop ways of practising that provides an integrated and cohesive answer to the needs of the client/family/population’⁷ (p.9). While very popular, another concept is often used in similar contexts in the literature: collaborative practice. It is defined as what ‘happens when multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds work together with patients, families, carers and communities to deliver the highest quality of care’⁸ (p.13). It highlighted the need for teams to work together to improve health outcomes and the need to develop interprofessional education to improve collaborative practice between healthcare professionals.⁸ The first definition was produced by researchers, then the second by the WHO a few years later. Both definitions share similarities: they mention the need for several professionals from different professions to work together to help patients, their relatives and the global population.

Frameworks of interprofessional collaboration education for collaborative practice

There are two main frameworks of competencies for teaching interprofessional collaboration developed in Canada and the USA.

The Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (CIHC) identified six competency domains for interprofessional collaboration: (1) relationship-focused care/services, (2) team communication, (3) role clarification and negotiation, (4) team functioning, (5) team differences/disagreement processing and (6) collaborative leadership.⁹ This framework states the team communication domain as ‘All members of a team will communicate with each other in a cooperative, responsive and respectful manner while paying attention to both the content and the relational elements of communication’⁹ (p.6).

The Interprofessional Education Collaborative identified four core competencies for interprofessional collaboration practice: (1) values and ethics; (2) roles and responsibilities; (3) communication; (4) teams and teamwork.¹⁰ The general statement for the communication domain is another definition, as ‘Communicate in a responsive, responsible, respectful and compassionate manner with team members’¹⁰ (p.15).

Lack of definition for interprofessional communication and the different paradigms of communication

However, the definition of IPC provided by these two statements is not operational enough. They use the term ‘communicate’ but do not define what communication is or what it means to communicate, although the CIHC definition emphasises ‘the content and the relational elements of communication’⁹ (p.6). These two aspects are related to different paradigms of communication.

A recent work by Fox et al identified three models of communication used in research on IPC in health and social care: the transmission model, the transactional model and the constitutive model of communication.¹¹ The transmission model is an information-oriented approach, which focuses on the ‘accurate transmission of information from one person to another’¹¹ (p.9). This model considers that the meaning of communication is inherent to the message. In opposition, the transactional model’s fundamental premise is that people create meaning through interaction.¹¹ It also integrates that context influences communication. This model focuses on ‘the contextual process of meaning-making, or interpretation, that occurs in interaction’¹¹ (p.12). Therefore, the transactional model has an interest in the relations between individuals, and not only on the messages. Finally, the constitutive model of communication goes a step further and considers that ‘communication does more than serve as the medium for the co-creation of meaning; it produces, or constitutes, our social world’¹¹ (p.14). This model takes communication as the starting point for all social forces in society. This model does not consider that context exists first and influences communication, but that communication processes constantly create and shape social contexts.

Each of these models has situations when it is conceptually useful in IPC and also has limitations. Figure 1 summarises these three models, their focuses, situations where they are useful and their limitations.

Figure 1. Summary of the three models of communication in IPC, from Fox et al (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)).¹¹ IP, interprofessional; IPC, IP communication.

Preliminary search

A preliminary search of MEDLINE, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Evidence Synthesis, searching only reviews using the term ‘Interprofessional communication’ in their title or abstract, was conducted in June 2025. The results of this preliminary search are presented in online supplemental file 1.

After the preliminary search was concluded, we did not find any review focused on a global overview of how IPC research is conducted in healthcare. The review from Johnson and Moeckli found that 82% of the articles included did not define communication, highlighting the need for further conceptual studies on IPC.¹² There seems to be a lack of conceptual studies, as well as a lack of consensus on the definition of IPC.

Aim

The aim of this study is to fill this conceptual gap in the literature and to provide a comprehensive view of IPC research in healthcare and social work.

Methods and analysis

Design

To answer our goals, we developed a scoping review protocol to identify the characteristics of studies on the topic and the definitions of IPC or communication models they use, either explicitly or implicitly. It is the appropriate method for these questions, because it is the type of review best suited to ‘To examine how research is conducted on a certain topic or field’ and ‘To clarify key concepts/definitions in the literature’¹³ (p.2).

This scoping review protocol was developed according to the guidance proposed by Peters et al.¹⁴ We followed the plan proposed by this guidance: review questions, eligibility criteria, type of evidence source, search strategy, study selection, data extraction, data analysis and presentation. We followed their proposed adaptation for scoping review protocols of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis-Protocols (PRISMA-P guidelines (see online supplemental file 2).^{14 15}

The proposed scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the JBI methodology for scoping reviews, and the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews.^{16 17}

Review questions

The two main questions of this review are:

1. How is the research about IPC in health conducted?

2. How is IPC defined by the researchers?

Eligibility criteria

The PCC (Population, Concept, Context) framework was used to develop the eligibility criteria, aligned with the aim of the review and the review questions.¹⁵

Population: Articles about health professionals, allied health professionals and social workers, as well as students in these fields, will be included.

Concept: Articles that examine IPC in healthcare will be included. To be included, an article must use the term ‘interprofessional communication’ or talk about communication between healthcare professionals and/or social workers; and this must be evaluated in the article, either quantitatively or qualitatively. For example, experimental studies where IPC is an outcome or qualitative studies that describe communication processes or relations between healthcare professionals will be included.

Context: Articles investigating IPC in any type of healthcare setting in any country will be considered.

Type of sources

This scoping review will consider published articles, of all types and methodologies. Grey literature will not be considered in order to ensure the selection of peer-reviewed sources with established methodological rigour and due to practical constraints related to the time and resources required for comprehensive identification and appraisal of non-indexed materials.

Search strategy

A three-step search strategy will be used in this review.

Step 1: An initial limited search of MEDLINE (PubMed) and CINAHL (EBSCO) was performed to identify articles on the topic. This initial limited search included only the expression ‘Interprofessional communication’.

Step 2: The text words contained in the titles and abstracts of the first 50 results in each database and their index terms were used to develop a full search strategy for MEDLINE (PubMed), CINAHL and APA PsycINFO (EBSCO), EMBASE (Science Direct) and Web of Science (Clarivate), shown in table 1. A total of 22 798 citations was retrieved in October 2025.

Table 1. Search strategy for all the databases.

Database	Equation	Number of citations found on September 2025
MEDLINE (PubMed)	Communication(Tiab])AND (“Interprofessional relation*“(Tiab])OR “Interdisciplinary communication”(Tiab])OR “Interprofessional communication”(Tiab])OR “intraprofessional communication”(Tiab])OR “collaborative communication”(Tiab])OR “Team communication”(Tiab])OR “Interpersonal communication”(Tiab])OR “SBAR”(Tiab])OR “staff communication”(Tiab])OR “interprofessional teamwork”(Tiab])OR “ward round”(Tiab])OR “multidisciplinary round”(Tiab))	6471
CINAHL and APA PsycINFO (EBSCO)	(TI (Communication) OR AB (Communication)) AND ((TI (“Interprofessional relation*“) OR AB (“Interprofessional relation*“)) OR (TI (“Interdisciplinary communication”) OR AB (“Interdisciplinary communication”)) OR (TI (“Interprofessional communication”) OR AB (“Interprofessional communication”)) OR (TI (“intraprofessional communication”) OR AB (“intraprofessional communication”)) OR (TI (“collaborative communication”) OR AB (“collaborative communication”)) OR (TI (“Team communication”) OR AB (“Team communication”)) OR (TI (“Interpersonal communication”) OR AB (“Interpersonal communication”)) OR (TI (SBAR) OR AB (SBAR)) OR (TI (“staff communication”) OR AB (“staff communication”)) OR (TI (“interprofessional teamwork”) OR AB (“interprofessional teamwork”)) OR (TI (“ward round”) OR AB (“ward round”)) OR (TI (“multidisciplinary round”) OR AB (“multidisciplinary round”)))	5415
EMBASE (Science Direct: max eight booleans operators)	Title, abstract, keywords : Communication AND (“Interprofessional relation” OR “Interdisciplinary communication” OR “Interprofessional communication” OR “intraprofessional communication” OR “collaborative communication” OR “Team communication” OR “Interpersonal communication” OR “interprofessional teamwork”)	2513
Web of Science (Clarivate)	AB=Communication AND (AB=“Interprofessional relation*” OR AB=“Interdisciplinary communication” OR AB=“Interprofessional communication” OR AB=“intraprofessional communication” OR AB=“collaborative communication” OR AB=“Team communication” OR AB=“Interpersonal communication” OR AB=“SBAR” OR AB=“staff communication” OR AB=“interprofessional teamwork” OR AB=“ward round” OR AB=“multidisciplinary round”)	8399

Step 3: The reference lists of the reviews included in this scoping review will be screened for additional studies.

Studies published in French or English will be included in order to be readable by the reviewers. If enough relevant sources written in another language are found during the search, other researchers who speak the language will be contacted to try to arrange translation of the sources. There will be no restrictions on the date of publication.

If key authors on the topic are identified, they will be contacted to provide additional sources of evidence.

Study selection

Following the search, all identified citations were collated into Rayyan (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar).¹⁸ 9722 duplicates were removed using the Rayyan deduplication tool, with a threshold of 90% similarity between articles to be considered duplicates.¹⁸ A pilot test of the inclusion criteria was conducted by two independent reviewers (HT and FB-V) on a random sample of 50 titles and abstracts. The two reviewers discussed any disagreements that arose at this stage until consensus was reached. The inclusion criteria were not changed. The remaining titles and abstracts are being screened by the same two independent reviewers to assess the inclusion criteria for the review. Potentially relevant sources will be retrieved in full. The full text of the selected citations will be assessed in detail against the inclusion criteria by the same two independent reviewers. Reasons for exclusion of sources of evidence at full text that do not meet the inclusion criteria will be recorded and reported in the scoping review. Any disagreements between the reviewers at any stage of the selection process will be resolved through discussion. The results of the search and study inclusion process will be reported in full in the final scoping review and presented in a PRISMA flow diagram.¹⁷ The planned end date for this step of the scoping review is May 2026.

Data extraction

Data will be extracted from the papers included in the scoping review by two independent reviewers (HT and FB-V) following a process that respects the most recent recommendation.¹⁹ A pilot test of the inclusion criteria will be conducted by the two independent reviewers on a random sample of 10 articles. They will discuss any disagreements that arise at this stage until a consensus is reached. If the draft extraction tool is changed at this stage, it will be noted in the final report. The data from the remaining articles will then be charted by the same two independent reviewers using the stabilised tool. The extracted data will include specific details regarding the PCC, study methods and key findings relevant to the review questions. For the secondary studies included in this review (ie, literature reviews), some information will be left blank to avoid skewing the results by counting some primary studies more than once. The first version of the draft extraction tool is available in table 2.

Table 2. Draft data extraction table.

Article: Author(s), reference and year of publication

Article type Study methods

Population: Profession of professionals or students included. (Primary studies only)

Context: Country or region in which the study takes place. (Primary studies only)

Context: Type of healthcare or academic setting. (Primary studies only)

Concept: Definition of communication or interprofessional communication provided by the authors, if any

Concept: How is interprofessional communication assessed? Primary studies only

Concept: Model of communication implicitly or explicitly used in the article

This draft will be modified and revised as necessary during the process of extracting data from each included evidence source. The changes will be detailed and explained in the scoping review methods section. Any disagreements between reviewers will be resolved through discussion. Where appropriate, authors of papers will be contacted to request missing or additional data, as necessary. There will be no critical appraisal of the individual sources of evidence, as this is not appropriate for the objectives of this scoping review.

Data analysis and presentation

The completed data table will be presented in the scoping review, in the main text or in an appendix, depending on the journal in which the review is published.

The data will be analysed using basic descriptive analysis (eg, frequency counts of population, concept or location of studies).¹⁹

For the first objective of this scoping review, the results will be presented using concept maps and tables that summarises the main findings in terms of the year of publication, study type, PCC.

For the second objective of this scoping review, the results will also be presented using tables and concept maps summarising the different definitions or models of IPC used by the included articles.

The presentation of the results will be adapted as necessary, according to the findings of the scoping review. Because we are conducting a scoping review that is mostly descriptive, we will not assess the certainty of evidence using the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach.¹⁶

Current stage of the scoping review

The scoping review is currently at the screening stage of the 13 076 citations remaining after duplicate removal.

Patient and public involvement

This work analyses existing research studies, and therefore, involves no patients or members of the public.

Ethics and dissemination

Formal ethical approval is not required, as primary data will not be collected in this study.

Findings of the scoping review will be disseminated through professional networks, conference presentations and publication in a scientific journal.

The results of this review will hopefully help to open the conceptual ‘black box’ where interprofessional collaboration processes, so IPC, are often put.²⁰ Providing a global panorama on the subject will also help identify gaps and priorities for future research.