Resource Center

Over the past half century, there have been ebbs and flows of interest in linking what is now called interprofessional education (IPE) with interprofessional collaboration and team-based care. Whereas considerable research has focused on student learning, only recently have researchers begun to look beyond the classroom and beyond learning outcomes for the impact of IPE on such issues as patient safety, patient and provider satisfaction, quality of care, health promotion, population health, and the cost of care.

Improved inclusion of women’s health education among a growing cadre of health professionals is a key task for the coming decade. Today, experts in the field of women’s health define the discipline as a product of cultural, social, and psychological factors in addition to biology (Verdonk, Benschop, de Haes, & Lagro-Janssen, 2009). Independent approaches to improve women’s health curricula can promote advances in the field. However, women’s health education would also benefit from a collaborative effort to create a broader agenda for women’s health curricula.

With rapid health care transformation efforts underway across the nation, there is increasing attention on strategies to improve outcomes and reduce avoidable costs for the small subset of individuals who account for the majority of health care spending. As innovative models emerge, policymakers, payers, and providers are eager to identify and scale effective approaches for serving high-need, high-cost patients.

This report provides a primer for implementing interprofessional education (IPE) within pharmacy and health sciences curricula. In 2013, a panel of administrators and faculty members, whose institutions offered IPE, funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, shared best collaborative practice models at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Annual Meeting. These presenters subsequently collaborated to write a primer as guidance for other institutions interested in successfully implementing and continuously enhancing the quality of IPE programs.

Lead Institution: The University of Queensland

Authors: The iTOFT Consortium, Australia (2015)

This project focuses on the development of a work-based assessment tool to enable feedback to individuals in relation to teamwork.

In an interprofessional education program, nursing and speech-language pathology students pool their expertise for better training and patient care.

Hagge, D., Noureddine, N., Brady, D., & Ofstad, W. (2015). Dealing with Dysphagia--Together. The ASHA Leader, 20(6), 34–36. doi. 10.1044.Leader.AE.20062015.34.

A set of several documents describing the work by Bruce E. Spivey and Gary M. Arsham in the 1970s to create a School of Health Professions in collaboration with the University of the Pacific at what is now the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.

The School of Health Professions was designed to address commonly recognized deficiencies in the education of health professionals and in the contemporary delivery of health care. The School focuses on primary health care, interprofessional education and care delivery, and self-paced curricula.

Over the past half century, there have been ebbs and flows of interest in linking what is now called interprofessional education (IPE) with interprofessional collaboration and team-based care. Whereas considerable research has focused on student learning, only recently have researchers begun to look beyond the classroom and beyond learning outcomes for the impact of IPE on such issues as patient safety, patient and provider satisfaction, quality of care, health promotion, population health, and the cost of care.

In April 2015, the Macy Foundation hosted a conference which issued a series of recommendations for health professions schools and healthcare organizations around the use of existing and emerging technologies to enhance health professions education and build a “continuously learning health system.”