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OBJECTIVE AND PARTICIPANTS: This program provides an interprofessional course to students, allowing them to learn together with each other and their elder teachers.

GOALS: include refining their professional parameters (turf), learning how to successfully collaborate with other professionals (team), and determining how to effectively design intervention plans for elders within their own communities (town). Various methods of evaluation, such as journals, participation in rounds, and OSCEs, used to assess students' status are described.

An interprofessional team of maternity care providers and academics developed a pilot interprofessional education (IPE) program in maternity care for undergraduate students in nursing, midwifery and medicine. There are few published studies examining IPE programs in maternity care, particularly at the undergraduate level, that examine long-term outcomes. This paper outlines findings from a case study that explored how participation in an IPE program in maternity care may enhance student knowledge, skills/attitudes, and may promote their collaborative behavior in the practice setting.

OBJECTIVE:

This article describes an evaluation of a curriculum approach to integrating interprofessional education (IPE) in collaborative mental health practice across the pre- to post-licensure continuum of medical education.

METHODS:

A systematic evaluation of IPE activities was conducted, utilizing a combination of evaluation study designs, including: pretest-posttest control group; one-group pre-test-post-test; and one-shot case study. Participant satisfaction, attitudes toward teamwork, and self-reported teamwork abilities were key evaluative outcome measures.

Effective communication and coordination are critical components for improving collaborative care delivery among different healthcare providers who work in mobile and time-pressured environments. Increasingly, healthcare providers are exploring alternative communication technologies to help bridge the temporal and spatial issues that are often inherent in the clinical communication conundrum.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22828675

Since the publication of its reports, Health professions education: A bridge to quality (2003) and To err is human: Building a safer health system (2000), the Institute of Medicine has continued to emphasize interprofessional education (IPE), founded on quality improvement and informatics, as a better way to prepare healthcare professionals for practice. As this trend continues, healthcare education will need to implement administrative and educational processes that encourage different professions to collaborate and share resources.

This paper reports on a longitudinal follow-up evaluation of an interprofessional experiential course to support the development of effective communication and interpersonal relationship skills in palliative care: 'It's good to listen: advanced communication skills in end of life care'. The course was developed from evidence-based guidance produced by the West of Scotland Cancer Network and NHS Education for Scotland in 2009. The aim of the study was to explore the factors that support or hinder the sustainable integration of skills and learning from the course into clinical practice.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18202993

The education of health professions students is rooted historically in time-honored and silo-bound traditions of pedagogy and content not easily influenced by outside forces. However, the quality chasm work of the Institute of Medicine, Institute of Healthcare Improvement, Quality and Safety Education for Nurses, and other groups has led to a remarkable willingness to change at one academic health sciences university. This article describes one university's strategies, challenges, and successes in delivering interprofessional educational programs.

The Linköping Faculty of Health Sciences is a pioneer of interprofessional education (IPE) at the undergraduate level. It was started in 1986 in full scale with six health educations involved. The vision and how it became a reality is described as well as possible advantages and constraints. It is important to have one common pedagogic principle for all educations involved. Problem based learning was chosen and introduced during the initial study module (10 wks). Thereafter IPE comes back during the curricula with common seminars, study days and ward training.