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Communications strategies are central to the planning and execution of interprofessional education (IPE) programs. The diversity of telecommunications-based tools and platforms available for IPE is rapidly expanding. Each tool and platform has a potentially important role to play. The selection, testing, and embedding of tools, such as social networking platforms, within education programs can be very challenging.

Most experts, including the conference sponsors and the IPEC panel, believe that in order to deliver high-quality, safe and efficient care, and meet the public’s increasingly complex health care needs, the educational experience must shift from one in which health profession students are educated in silos to one that fosters collaboration, communication and a team approach to providing care.

A study in an English Faculty of Health and Social Care explores the effects of a pre-qualifying interprofessional curriculum incorporating interprofessional modules in each year of study. The study design involves collecting data on entry to the Faculty, after completion of the second interprofessional module, on qualification and after 9 months qualified practice. At each point, students complete questionnaires concerning communication and teamwork skills and interprofessional learning and working. This paper presents results from 723 students at the second data collection point.

Since introducing dermatology at the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic (PNC), we have successfully treated and made an impact on over 40 patients with varying dermatological conditions and created an effective follow-up protocol for patients seen. As a student-run free clinic, the PNC encounters patients with diverse medical problems that we often cannot address at the clinic. Problems that we often see are patients dealing with mild to severe skin conditions that could be easily addressed by a dermatologist.

The Phillips Neighborhood Clinic (PNC) is a completely student run clinic that offers free, high quality, comprehensive care to a patient population that otherwise lacks access to such services. The PNC achieves this through three main principles:

(1)interdisciplinary care, (2) student leadership, and (3) community collaboration.

This document explains the three PNC principles.

Purpose: We developed and implemented a series of interprofessional resuscitation rounds targeting fourth year nursing and medical students, and junior residents from a variety of specialty programs.

The Toronto Rehabilitation Institute (Toronto Rehab) is a current leader in the movement of

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to show that free flowing teamwork depends on at least three aspects of team life: functional diversity, social cohesion and superordinate identity.

The effective reduction of medical errors depends on an environment of safety for patients in both clinically based and systems-oriented arenas. Formal teamwork training is proposed as a systems approach that will achieve these ends. In a study conducted by (Dynamics Research Corporation,) weaknesses and error patterns in Emergency Department teamwork were assessed, and a prospective evaluation of a formal teamwork training intervention was conducted. Improvements were obtained in five key teamwork measures, and most importantly, clinical errors were significantly reduced.

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.