The University of Minnesota 1Health program has set forth with the intention of exposing a broad range of health and health care professional students to the concepts of interprofessional collaboration through interprofessional education.  The 1Health introductory course, the Foundations of Interprofessional Communication and Collaboration, or FIPCC (fip-see), is a required course for over 1000 students across the U of M Academic Health Center.  The course material is presented using a small group, discussion-based format.  Groups are comprised of twelve students from as few as two to as many as eight professions.  These groups (85 of them in Fall 2013!) meet for six, two-hour sessions, engaging in facilitator guided exercises and discussions designed to promote the development of competencies related to interprofessional collaborative practice.

As a course based in small group, interactive learning, FIPCC presents the normal challenges one finds to teaching using this strategy.  Among these, the balanced participation of the learners is an objective that requires skill in facilitation and commitment from the students.  An additional challenge to this norm is the fact that this course also includes a range of learner not typical of other small group learning environments.

Within FIPCC there is a mixture of students with a range of education background and experience.  Although there is diversity within programs, the typical student from degree fields such as undergraduate dental hygiene, nursing, and clinical lab sciences are early stage university trainees, often with limited experience in the university system.  In contrast, students from the first-professional degree programs, including DDS, MD, PharmD, and DVM students, are relatively old hands in the university system, having completed prerequisite degree programs.  Whereas any small group-learning environment must cope with the range of experience of the participants, this is an inherent part of combining trainees from different programs, making the issue integral to the challenge of the early-stage IPE environment.

In preparing facilitators to engage their assigned groups we focus on two issues meant to level the playing field.  The first is that a lack of experience and, as is sometimes the case, confidence does not mean a lack of competence: students from all the health and health care professional programs meet the requirements for program entry and are thus considered members of their professions.  The second is that experience in previous degree programs, even with concepts and skills in communication and professional development that are topics of our introductory IPE course, is not a replacement for the interprofessional learning sought when we bring students from these programs together in their professional roles for the first time.  All students in FIPCC are new to their professional roles.  All students in the course are placed on a trajectory of learning how to become members of their profession and members of a team of professionals whose mission is to manage and provide health related service.

It is a challenge to preside over a diverse group of learners where, in order to be successful, it is expected that participation be broad and inclusive.  One thing we stress during orientation exercises is the “from, with, and about” model of IPE.  It is the “from” in particular that can provide balance to the range of learner issue, as each student is now placed in the position of being a representative of their profession, perhaps for the first time.  They are now the nurse or the pharmacist or the dentist in the room.  Their peers are at the same early stage of membership in their profession, and they will have a lot to learn about each other.