Interprofessional Education (IPE)

The World Health Organization published its framework for action on interprofessional education and collaborative practice in 2010, and the definition in it has held up as the reference point because of the work the three prepositions do. Learning about another profession is a lecture. Learning from and with them requires that the other profession be in the room, doing something, with something at stake for both learners.

In the United States the Interprofessional Education Collaborative organizes the work around four competency domains: values and ethics for interprofessional practice, roles and responsibilities, interprofessional communication, and teams and teamwork. IPEC first published the competencies in 2011 and released a revised version in 2023, and most schools that report on interprofessional education map their activities to those four domains.

Accreditation pushes in the same direction. LCME element 7.9, interprofessional collaborative skills, requires that a medical school's core curriculum prepare students to work on health care teams that include other health professions, and that the curricular experiences include practitioners or students from those professions. Meeting that in a way that changes how graduates behave is much harder than meeting it on paper, because the schedules of nursing, pharmacy, social work, and medical students rarely line up.

Simulation is where most programs get real interprofessional education, since a shared scenario gives every profession a reason to be present and a debriefing gives the team somewhere to talk about how it actually worked. The sessions hardest to schedule tend to be the most valuable: a family meeting where the resident, the bedside nurse, and the chaplain each hold part of the conversation exposes role confusion and handoff gaps that no single-profession OSCE will find.