Resource Center

Traditional workforce planning methodologies and interprofessional education (IPE) approaches will not address the significant challenges facing health care systems seeking to integrate services, eliminate waste and meet rising demand within fixed or shrinking budgets. This article describes how New Zealand’s workforce planning approach could be used as a model by other countries to move toward needs-based, interprofessional workforce planning.

Abstract

Many universities in the United States are investing in classrooms and campuses designed to increase collaboration and teamwork among the health professions. To date, we know little about whether these learning spaces are having the intended impact on student performance. Recent advances in the identification of interprofessional teamwork competencies provide a much-needed step toward a defined outcome metric. Rigorous study of the relationship between design and student competence in collaboration also requires clear specification of design concepts and development of testable frameworks.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is now recognized as an important initiative to prepare the next generation of health providers. Although IPE has been embraced by many institutions, faculty development still remains an issue. In this manuscript, the authors share their story of one attempt to educate a variety of health science faculty on IPE in what was perceived as an approachable venue. The story of its epic failure and lessons learned will be shared to help others avoid similar pitfalls.

In July 2018, over 400 health professionals gathered in Minneapolis, MN to attend the Nexus Summit, “Creating Results: Interprofessional Vision to Action.” In her plenary address, Barbara Brandt, Director of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education, spoke about the seismic shifts occurring in health care and health professions education and the importance of asking the right questions. This editorial provides a synopsis of Brandt’s address and raises questions for  nurse educators.

Producing the best evidence to show educational outcomes, such as competency achievement and credentialing effectiveness, across the health professions education continuum will require large multisite research projects and longitudinal studies. Current limitations that must be overcome to reach this goal include the prevalence of single-institution study designs, assessments of a single curricular component, and cross-sectional study designs that provide only a snapshot in time of a program or initiative rather than a longitudinal perspective.

In this editorial for the Journal of Interprofessional Care, authors including National Center director Barbara F. Brandt pay tribute to Scott Reeves, Editor-in-Chief.

The National Collaborative for Improving the Clinical Learning Environment (NCICLE) is a growing group of over 40 organizations representing a variety of health professions. NCICLE is beginning a discussion of issues related to culture in health care, specifically how the current culture inhibits optimal outcomes, and the discordance between current early interprofessional education (IPE) curricula in health professions schools and traditional practice models in health care. In October 2017, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the Josiah Macy Jr.

Using adult learning principles, health professions educators are well positioned to create interprofessional learning systems for collaborative, team‐based practice in the transforming health‐care system.

Interprofessionalism is grounded in a core set of guiding principles for educational and practice initiatives among healthcare professionals. It has been shown to improve proximal outcomes, such as patient satisfaction. However, the link between interprofessionalism and more distal outcomes, such as patient health outcomes, has proven difficult to demonstrate quantitatively.