Steps to Transdisciplinary Collaborative Practice, The Way Towards Building Communities of Practice in Early Child Health Care: A Case from Colombia

Abstract

In 2011 Colciencias (the Colombian National Research Agency) opened a grant invitation to submit proposals around strategic public health problems. Such problems had to require the collaboration of different social actors able to conduct research on the determinants of health and to generate processes that acknowledged community appropriation of learned lessons, while constructing a knowledge network that could support a sustainable capacity building environment. A team of around 40 professionals from different disciplines submitted seven action research projects that constituted the comprehensive programme ‘Even Life Start’ (ELS). The purpose of the programme was to explore and understand risk and protective factors from an ecological approach related to early child health care and the possibility of achieving developmental goals in children under six years of age in 16 different municipalities in two states of the Central Region of Colombia. This chapter reports strategies and resources that contributed to leading change and the transition from a multidisciplinary to a transdisciplinary experience. The collaborative practice experience of participant professionals is presented from the perspective of the directors, who reflect on how leadership dealt with different challenges, how contrasting theoretical approaches to collaboration were handled and what lessons were learned.