Interprofessional Education: The Format of the Future

Interprofessional Education: The Format of the Future

Lindsey Zeplin, PharmD

PGY-1 Managed Care Pharmacy Resident

Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States

Medicine today is becoming increasingly complex due to higher prevalence of chronic diseases, growth in the patient population, and a shortage of medical providers (1). Advanced knowledge and skills are required to meet the demands of the medical field, and, as a result no one healthcare worker can manage all of a patient’s needs. To accommodate, healthcare delivery is moving away from the traditional physician-centered model of care to a team-based model.

Traditional student training models promote monoprofessional learning and endorse a hierarchy in healthcare that encourages competition rather than fostering teamwork (2). A different approach is needed to provide workers with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to effectively work together. Interprofessional education (IPE) integrated into healthcare curricula is a promising means to achieve this training.

What is IPE?

As established by the World Health Organization (WHO), IPE occurs “when two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve healthcare” (3). IPE has been adopted as an accreditation requirement for many healthcare professions including pharmacy, nursing, dentistry, public health, and medicine (4).

What does IPE look like in practice?

IPE can be incorporated into a variety of program types: workshops, experiential education, didactic courses, and embedded throughout the pharmacy school curriculum. Institutions have taken different approaches to IPE.

Cooper Medical School of Rowan University and University of the Science Philadelphia College of Pharmacy (5)

First and second year pharmacy and medicine students are placed on teams. The teams complete an experiential rotation together, working at a clinic and other sites, along with attending a didactic course.

South Caroline College of Pharmacy (6)

Third year pharmacy students complete nine IPE activities embedded in a required course, Clinical Assessment. Students participate in activities such as a “code blue” simulation, making recommendations to an attending physician, and working on teams providing acute care and developing a transition of care plan for discharge. During these activities, pharmacy students work with medicine, nursing, and/or physician-assistant students.

University of Michigan College of Pharmacy

From personal experience, I can recount that students complete a semester-long IPE course focused on clinical decision-making. At the beginning of the term, students are divided into teams made up of third-year pharmacy students, third-year dental students, master of social work students, medical students, and advanced-practice nursing students. Students remain on the same team all semester and rotate through a series of discipline-specific modules where they work together to solve patient care cases.

How do educational theories apply?

Educators should embrace IPE and work to incorporate it into pharmacy school curricula. However, this type of education comes with its challenges. The ADDIE model is a guideline for building effective training tools. It is comprised of five phases: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (7). This model will be important to follow when developing a new IPE course given this type of instruction is new and has not been tested as much as traditional health professional teaching. Analyzing student needs will be more complex because multiple disciplines need to be included; disciplines that have been taught different content using different instructional methods. The capabilities of each profession must be assessed, and the content must be tailored in a way that is meaningful to each profession – not too challenging for one or too basic for another. Designing material appropriate for the entire audience will be no simple feat, but it will help advance the future of healthcare by best preparing its upcoming providers.

References:

1.       Bodenheimer, T., Chen, E., & Bennett, H. D. (2009). Confronting the growing burden of chronic disease: can the US health care workforce do the job?. Health Affairs, 28(1), 64-74.

2.       McNair, R., Brown, R., Stone, N., & Sims, J. (2001). Rural interprofessional education: promoting teamwork in primary health care education and practice. The Australian journal of rural health, 9, S19-26.

3.       World Health Organization, 2010. Framework for Action on Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (WHO/HRH/HPN/10.3) (Geneva, Switzerland).

4.       Zorek, J., & Raehl, C. (2013). Interprofessional education accreditation standards in the USA: a comparative analysis. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 27(2), 123-130.

5.       Rotz, M. E., Dueñas, G. G., Zanoni, A., & Grover, A. B. (2016). Designing and evaluating an interprofessional experiential course series involving medical and pharmacy students. American journal of pharmaceutical education, 80(5), 85.

6.       Shrader, S., & Griggs, C. (2014). Multiple interprofessional education activities delivered longitudinally within a required clinical assessment course. American journal of pharmaceutical education, 78(1), 14.

7.       Allen, W. C. (2006). Overview and evolution of the ADDIE training system. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 8(4), 430-441.