Professional Caregiving: Working Together to Provide Quality, Comprehensive, Coordinated Care—A Call to Action

Abstract

In the introductory chapter, we encouraged readers to critique the individual chapters by thinking about the contributions each discipline has made to caregiving and the potential for continued maturation, leadership, and innovation over time. We suspect this was not an easy task because of the vastly different conceptual lenses used by each author to report the activity of his or her discipline and the freedom each author was given to develop the chapters. Thus, our call to action in this concluding chapter has two parts. First, we used themes gleaned from the chapters in each section to construct a framework for describing disciplinary participation in caregiving related activity, as presented by the authors in their chapters. Second, we used this framework to identify strengths across the disciplinary activities that are desirable and are likely to be maintained and areas that need attention in order to move forward with quality, comprehensive, coordinated care in the twenty-first century.