professionals must be familiar with each other’s expertise, roles, and responsibilities: otherwise, collaboration is not possible. Communication allows team members to trans- cend their inclination towards their own ﬁeld and ﬁnd common interprofessional territory (D’Amour & Oandasan, 2005). This collaborative relationship can help implement continuous and evolving interaction between professionals. In the IP-SDM model, the necessity that professionals share knowledge is illustrated by dotted lines. The model also makes explicit the roles of a decision coach and family members. Although the role of a decision coach in relation to SDM between patients and physicians has already been described (Stacey et al., 2008), the model makes its interprofessional elements explicit. The decision coach role is one that can be assumed by various members of the healthcare team, depending on the decision. Most commonly, this role has been played by nurses, social workers, psychologists, and pharmacists (Lalonde et al., 2008). As for family, the literature considers family to have an important inﬂuence on patient decision-making (Whitney, 2003). For exam- ple, family members may hold values about the outcomes of options that are different from the patient’s and which may have more inﬂuence on the decision than the patient’s own preferences (Chambers-Evans, 2002; Tilden et al., 1999). Family may also be central to implementing a particular choice (Van Horn et al., 2002). In addition, family is sometimes a legal proxy or surrogate decision- maker for the paediatric, elderly, or seriously ill patient (Gabe et al., 2004). The IP-SDM model makes these inﬂuences explicit and encourages further exploration of the role of family in healthcare decision-making. In addition, the model’s goal is not to increase the workload of those involved but rather to make the process more efﬁcient by assigning speciﬁc tasks to speciﬁc actors. It is unrealistic to assume that all individuals involved in the decision-making process will be together in the same room for all steps of the process. Making IP-SDM work can be complex, especially when decision support technologies are involved. Haggerty et al. (2003) have suggested that informational continuity requires tools and technologies that facilitate commu- nication and ensure deliberation. This suggestion is congruent with the core deﬁnition of primary care, one that is based on interpersonal continuity (Starﬁeld & Horder, 2007). Therefore, a key challenge is to give professionals access to new technologies that can support communication and deliberation. Future research could help by mapping how members of an interprofessional team come together to work on different parts of a larger decision-making process that occurs over time. Lastly, the stepwise process by which the new model was developed improves our understanding of how conceptual models and theories can be developed in the healthcare services and research domain. We used a mixed approach based on: knowledge synthesis; the clinical experience of individuals who participated in the workshop; and con- sensus-building methods that drew on the expertise of the 2011 Informa UK, Ltd. INTERPROFESSIONALISM AND SHARED DECISION-MAKING 23 same group of individuals. Moody (2005) argues that a consensus-building process can reﬂect participants’ collec- tive wisdom and produce conceptual models or theories that are more likely to be accepted in practice. However, he acknowledges that ‘‘some might argue that such a process will not necessarily produce the best result—the need to incorporate so many people’s ideas (‘‘design by committee’’) could lead to a loss of conceptual integrity’’ (p. 258). We believe that the hybrid approach we adopted to initiate the development of this new model, helped strengthen methods for developing new conceptual models for health services research, training and practice. Nonetheless, we recognise the need to validate the model beyond this team. Our study’s hybrid approach towards developing and reaching consensus on a new IP-SDM model constitutes a stepwise and transparent means of combining existing knowledge published in the literature with the expertise of individuals from very diverse backgrounds. None- theless, we acknowledge that the process we used to develop a new model was one among many. Thus, we cannot assume that the model is the subject of general consensus. Furthermore, although this model acknowl- edges the inﬂuence of factors associated with broader organizational and social contexts on an interprofessional approach to SDM in primary care, it does not detail which factors should be taken into account. More work is needed to clarify healthcare system levels that are important to an interprofessional approach to SDM. Also, when health professionals consider a situation through their particular professional perspective, work to clarify and identify options to be offered to the patient or the family must often be done. Ideally, the patient and the family should be involved throughout the process. There may, however, be situations where this is not possible. Therefore, when and how involvement is best accomplished is unclear. Finally, models are not static and therefore, we plan to modify the IP-SDM model with feedback from key stakeholders. CONCLUSION The new IP-SDM model for primary care has the potential to unify the process of SDM in different healthcare system settings and with different health professionals. This ﬁrst model was developed in an innovative, iterative consensus-building process that generated great interest among the participants. The next steps, essential to developing the model further, will focus on validating the model with a variety of stakeholders, including experts in interprofessional education and SDM at the individual level (i.e. the level of the patient and the other individuals involved in his/her case) and the healthcare system levels (e.g. managers and policy- makers). It will also be important to identify factors that could affect the model’s implementation in primary healthcare practice, education, and applied health services research.