Dr. Carole Orchard

Dr. Orchard is currently Professor in the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing and the former Coordinator of Interprofessional Health Education & Research at the University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on interprofessional patient-centred collaborative practice.

Dr. Orchard and her colleagues have developed several measurement instruments: Interprofessional Socialization & Valuing Scale (ISVS) and the Assessment of Interprofessional Team Collaboration Scale-II (AITCS-II), Interprofessional Collaborative Leadership Scale (ICLS), and Patients with Diabetes Ownership of their Self-Care Scale (PD-SCOS). She has recently published revisions to the AITCS with a new instrument specifically for assessing collaboration in IP students during group learning.

Dr. Orchard co-chaired the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative’s IP Competency Working Group who developed the CIHC National IP Competency Framework and an international working group is now working on audit tools to measure the process of collaboration in teams. In 2015 she published a book with colleagues on Interprofessional Client-Centered Collaborative Practice: What does it look like? How can it be achieved? Dr. Orchard has also published articles on the role of nurses within collaborative teams. Her research currently focuses on the role of patients both in their own self-care and in collaborative teams. Her work is frequently cited in the field of IPC.