As we have ramped up the national center, I’ve had the good fortune to hear from many of you who have shared your work, asked questions and requested support for developing and implementing interprofessional education and collaborative practice.  I’m seeing themes in your work and opportunities to connect across efforts. Importantly, they are the same themes we have included in our vision for the national center as a coordinating and collaborating organization:

• Leadership: Building the capacity to define and advance the field of interprofessional practice and education by creating an engaged community of leaders who cross boundaries
• Collaborative Practice and System Transformation. Building on the substantial body of work by sharing models of team-based care, competencies for collaborative practice, assessment strategies and experiences of systems transformation, particularly in health care and community health models
• Education and Training. Advancing excellence in interprofessional education as a value-added approach, ensuring effective collaborative practice by demonstrating learner, health and community outcomes
• Research, Evaluation and Scholarship. Promoting the scholarly inquiry of interprofessional practice and education through dissemination to advance best practices and evidence to advance the field
• Innovative and Novel Models. Providing a forum for new approaches to care delivery and health promotion to incorporate into existing team-based IPECP that offer novel approaches (e.g., integrated health, complementary and alternative medicine, the role of bioethics, design and health care, community health workers, role of volunteers in the community)

For the longer-term, we will be initiating projects and launching learning collaboratives in these areas to document outcomes and the value-added of interprofessional education to collaborative practice in a changing healthcare environment.

For now, I have invited two guest bloggers to kick off our online discussions on topics I’ve been asked about over and over again.

•  “Centralization: Is it the best model for IPE leadership?”

Paul Wietig, Ed.D., Assistant Vice President for Interprofessional Education, University of Buffalo Academic Health Center. A longtime educator, Dr. Wietig is responsible for interprofessional education across all schools of the AHC.

• “The “best” time: When should you launch your IPE program?”

Paul Jardine, Ph.D., University of Minnesota School of Dentistry. Dr. Jardine is faculty member and lead faculty member of the Foundations of Interprofessional Communications and Collaboration first-year course, serving more than 900 students annually.

The two blogs will be pushed to the National Center’s distribution list.  I invite you to engage with our bloggers, and we hope you will be willing to share your thoughts on what is working well and what additional tools would enhance our online conversation. It is our hope that the blogs will trigger nationwide online conversations about these two important topics.  We encourage you to join the conversation and share with others.