Resource Center

BACKGROUND: Patient-focused care provided by an interprofessional team has long been presented as the preferred method of primary care delivery. Community pharmacists should and can provide leadership for many clinical and managerial activities within the primary care team.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the extent to which community pharmacists are prepared to be members of the health care team, and to assess their support for general expansion of clinical responsibilities.

High-fidelity simulation in health professional programs helps educators and students meet the challenges of increasingly complex clinical practice settings. Simulation has been used primarily to train nursing students either in interprofessional teams or within their respective nursing training levels. However, students' experiences of learning alongside others in different levels or years of the nursing program have not been explored.

OBJECTIVES: To report the extent to which the placement of paramedic practitioner students (PPSs) in accredited general practice (GP) training practices supported their development as autonomous, patient-centred practitioners and fostered interprofessional learning.

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.

OBJECTIVE: This article discusses the strategies and challenges of implementing interprofessional education interventions with students from different disciplines. It reviews two models of interprofessional education in academic prelicensure curricula including the extra-curricular and the crossbar models by considering ease of implementation, program reach and sustainability. It also introduces the interprofessional enhancement approach as an additional curriculum development strategy.

Promoting teamwork in health and social care requires an understanding of the interface between interprofessional practice (IPP) and interprofessional education (IPE). A study with two parts, one qualitative and one quantitative, examined this interface in Norway. The first used focus groups to assess IPP rewards, barriers, and facilitating factors among practitioners in clinical settings. The second utilized an online survey to measure IPE attitudes, barriers, and facilitating factors among senior administrators in the educational system.

INTRODUCTION: Recent research suggests that effective interprofessional communication and collaboration can positively influence patient satisfaction and outcomes. Health professional communication skills do not necessarily improve over time but can improve with formal communication skills training (CST).

OBJECTIVES: The Institute of Medicine called for the integration of interprofessional education (IPE) into health professions curricula, in order to improve health care quality. In response, we developed, implemented, and evaluated a campus wide IPE program, shifting from traditional educational silos to greater collaboration.

The authors designed a participatory qualitative research study to develop a collaborative partnership between palliative care practitioners in Canada and in Chile. The research goal was to support the provision of palliative care in vulnerable settings through a participatory knowledge exchange process using qualitative and participatory methodologies. The study involved an interprofessional palliative care team from a primary health care centre in Chile and 5 adults receiving palliative care and their relatives.

The theoretical underpinnings of IPE emphasizes that we learn through interactions with others. Learners engaging with other professionals gain a better understanding of their roles, beliefs, values, and culture. Interdisciplinary problem-solving and active, collaborative tasks deepen this understanding and lead to shared patient care goals. Students in such activities have increased their perceived interprofessional competence and developed a better understanding of the role of communication, teamwork, and collaboration in patient care. The John A.