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This paper aims to be a theoretical examination of the role of individuals in sponsoring and facilitating effective, systemic change in organisations. Using reports of a number of high‐profile initiatives to improve patient safety, it seeks to analyse the role of individual health care professionals in developing and facilitating new systems of care that improve safety and quality.

The paper uses recent work in sociology that is concerned with the phenomenon of “sociological citizenship”. The authors test whether successful initiators of change in health care can be described as sociological citizens. This notion of sociological citizens is applied to a number of highly successful initiatives to improve safety and quality to extrapolate the factors associated with individual clinician leadership, which may have affected the success of such endeavours.

In each of the examples analysed the initiators of change can be characterised as sociological citizens. In reviewing the roles of these charismatic individuals it is evident that they see the relational interdependence between the individuals and organisations and that they use this information to achieve both professional and organisational objectives.

The paper uses a case study method to investigate the usefulness of the role of sociological citizenship in interventions that aim to improve patient safety. The paper reviews the key concepts and uses of the concept of sociological citizenship to produce a framework against which the case studies were assessed.

The authors suggest that a goal of policy for improving patient safety should be directed to the problem of how hospitals and health care organisations can create the conditions for encouraging the individual diligence and care that is needed to support reliable, safe health care practices.

Improving the safety and quality of health care is an important public health initiative. It has also proven to be difficult to achieve sustained reductions in the harm caused by the occurrence of adverse events in health care. The process of linking individual diligence with service outcomes may help to overcome one of the enduring struggles of health care systems around the world: the policy‐practice divide.

The paper directs attention towards the role of sociological citizenship in health care systems and organisations.

Government-run mental health services in Australia run predominantly on a multidisciplinary team (MDT) model. Literature and observation from practice shows that interprofessional tertiary sector training is absent, ad hoc or not documented, leaving students inadequately prepared for disciplinary differences in opinions and practices. Learning in interprofessional educational settings provides one way of overcoming the difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to describe the outcomes of an interprofessional learning experience targeting final year Australian students enroled in health promotion, registered nursing, enroled nursing, paramedic science, psychology, social work and occupational therapy who are intending to work in mental health teams.

Using a mixed method, pre- and post-test design (four time intervals), with data collected from three scales and open-ended questions, this study measured participant changes in knowledge and attitudes towards interprofessional education and mental health. The study also examined students’ and educators’ perceptions of the value of an interprofessional teaching and learning model.

There was a significant increase in clinical confidence at each time interval, suggesting that the intervention effects were maintained up to three months post-training. Themes about the value of interprofessional learning in mental health were extracted from student data: learning expanded students’ appreciation for difference; this in turn expanded students’ cross-disciplinary communication skills; growing appreciation for diverse world views was seen to be relevant to person-centred mental healthcare; and practice articulating one's own disciplinary views clarified professional identity.

Generalisability of the outcomes beyond the disciplines sampled in this research is limited. MDTs typically include doctors, but we were unable to include medical students because the university did not offer a medical programme. The readiness for participation in a collaborative MDT approach may differ among students groups, disciplines and universities and technical and further educations. There may also be differences not accounted for in these findings between undergraduate students and established healthcare professionals. Further research needs to establish whether the findings are applicable to other student groups and to professionals who already work within MDTs.

These results demonstrate that intensive interprofessional learning experiences in tertiary education can be effective means of increasing students’ awareness of the role of other professionals in MDT.