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A significant number of patients requiring critical care are now being managed outside of critical care facilities. There is evidence that staff looking after these patients lack the necessary knowledge and skills to care for them safely, and that effective pre-registration education can play a significant role in addressing these shortfalls in nurses' knowledge and skills.

BACKGROUND: Asynchronous e-learning is an appealing option for interprofessional education (IPE) as it addresses the geographic and timetabling barriers often encountered when organizing activities across educational programs.

AIM: This study examined the extent to which pre-licensure students were able to learn with, from, and about each other through completion of innovative online IPE learning modules.

BACKGROUND: An international consensus has emerged that interprofessional education (IPE) and other health care reforms are necessary to address the increasing complexity of patients' health needs. Despite overwhelming barriers to its system-wide implementation, health professional students worldwide have organized themselves to promote IPE and have achieved considerable attention. This study seeks to offer insights into what attracts students to IPE and other health care reform initiatives and how advocates of change can stimulate this interest.

A recent national assessment of emergency planning in Canada suggests that health care professionals are not properly prepared for disasters. In response to this gap, an interprofessional course in disaster management was developed, implemented and evaluated in Toronto, Canada from 2007 to 2008. Undergraduate students from five educational institutions in nursing, medicine, paramedicine, police, media and health administration programs took an eight-week online course.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20148622

The past decade witnessed momentum toward redesigning the U.S. health care system with the intent to improve quality of care. To achieve and sustain this change, health professions education must likewise reform to prepare future practitioners to optimize their ability to participate in the new paradigm of health care delivery.

OBJECTIVE:

To assess the extent to which US colleges and schools of pharmacy are incorporating interprofessional education into their introductory pharmacy practice experiences (IPPEs), and to identify barriers to implementation; characterize the format, structure, and assessment; and identify factors associated with incorporating interprofessional education in IPPEs.

METHODS:

An electronic survey of 116 US colleges and schools of pharmacy was conducted from March 2011 through May 2011.

RESULTS:

The growing popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), of which estimated 38% of adults in the United States used in 2007, has engendered changes in medical school curricula to increase students' awareness of it. Exchange programs between conventional medical schools and CAM institutions are recognized as an effective method of interprofessional education.

Faculties (i.e., schools) of medicine along with their sister health discipline faculties can be important organizational vehicles to promote, cultivate, and direct interprofessional education (IPE). The authors present information they gathered in 2007 about five Canadian IPE programs to identify key factors facilitating transformational change within institutional settings toward successful IPE, including (1) how successful programs start, (2) the ways successful programs influence academia to bias toward change, and (3) the ways academia supports and perpetuates the success of programs.

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to generate a theory of the interprofessional collaborative learning process of occupational therapy (OT) students who were engaged in a collaborative learning experience with students from other allied health disciplines. Data consisted of semi-structured interviews with nine OT students from four different interprofessional collaborative learning experiences at three universities.