Resource Center

This report is organized in the following fashion: first, we provide key definitions and principles that guided us in identifying core interprofessional competencies. Then, we describe the timeliness of interprofessional learning now, along with separate efforts by the six professional education organizations to move in this direction. We identify eight reasons why it is important to agree on a core set of competencies across the professions. A concept- interprofessionality- is introduced as the idea that is foundational to the identification of core interprofessional competency domains and the associated specific competencies. Interprofessional education has a dynamic relationship to practice needs and practice improvements. In the concluding background section, we describe three recently developed frameworks that identify interprofessional education as fundamental to practice

improvement.

Then, the competency approach to learning is discussed, followed by what distinguishes interprofessional competencies. We link our efforts to the five Institute of Medicine (IOM) core competencies for all health professionals (IOM, 2003). The introduction and discussion of the four competency domains

and the specific competencies within each form the core of the report. We describe how these competencies can be formulated into learning objectives

and learning activities at the pre-licensure/pre-certifying level, and name several factors influencing choice of learning activities. Educators are now beginning to develop more systematic curricular approaches for developing interprofessional competencies. We provide several examples. We conclude the report with discussion of key challenges to interprofessional competency development and acknowledge several limitations to the scope of the report. An appendix describes the goals of the IPEC group that prompted the development of this report, the panel’s charge, process and participants.