How Interprofessional Practice and Education is Impacting the Future of Health Care

As health care becomes increasingly complex and multifaceted, it has become apparent that no single health care professional can adequately address all a patient’s needs. This has led to a growing recognition of the importance of interprofessional practice and education (IPE), which aims to train medical specialists from different disciplines to collaborate and work effectively as a team. Failure to do so may costs lives. Fortunately, budding professionals can utilize interprofessional practice and education to develop these skills early in their careers.

The impact of IPE on the future of health care cannot be overstated, as it has the potential to improve patient outcomes, increase efficiency and reduce costs, and address many of the challenges facing the health care industry today.

Western University of Health Sciences offers the oldest IPE program in the country, not to mention one of the largest and most comprehensive. Since the program’s introduction in 2009, thousands of students across nine health care professions have successfully completed the program and gone on to become valuable members of the medical community.

Not only have IPE programs been empirically shown to benefit both students and patients, but evidence suggests they may in fact lead to a significant impact on the future of the health care industry. To better understand the monumental importance of these programs, let’s take a deep dive into the history and just what precisely makes them work.

How Interprofessional Practice and Education Works at WesternU

Interprofessional practice and education programs allows students to take learn with, about, and from other health professional students whose knowledge and skillsets may differ significantly from their own. Our interprofessional program also employs multiple educators and clinicians from a variety of professions.

To say that IPE programs focus on strengthening communication would be a grave oversimplification. Not only do students of various disciplines learn to work together toward the fulfillment of a shared goal, but along the way they must also learn skills such as conflict resolution and respect for the ethical concerns of their respective specializations.

Globally, IPE is expanding to include collaboration of students with clinical experiences such as systems-based medical practices and varying compositions of health care teams.

Above all, interprofessional practice and education allows health care workers to gain a fuller appreciation for the respective roles and responsibilities of various disciplines within the field. They learn not only their own part to play, but how it fits together with the roles of their colleagues in the grand scheme of a patient’s overall care.

A Brief History of Interprofessional Practice and Education

While interprofessional practice and education may not be the fastest-growing field of study, its benefits are anything but recently known. The United Kingdom established one of the first dedicated IPE centers, the Center for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education, as far back as 1987. The United States and Canada followed suit shortly into the new millennium.

As the first decade of the new millennium ended, almost half of all medical education institutions still neglected to offer IPE programs. The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education noted in 2009 that, despite a widely understood need for the benefits offered by IPE, actual implementation was spreading at the rate of molasses.

In 2010, the World Health Organization developed the Framework for Action on Interprofessional Education ; Collaborative Practice. This established a baseline for IPE programs worldwide, ensuring that students across the global health care industry could reap the same educational benefits wherever such programs are offered.

Primary Benefits of Interprofessional Practice and Education

To parse out the intrinsic benefits of IPE programs, it’s important to first understand that true interprofessional education involves more than simply learning from educators practicing different fields of study. If students are not learning to understand each other’s roles and work together, they are not truly practicing interprofessional education.

One might identify several core components of effective IPE programs. A well-designed program will teach:

• How to see things from the perspective of other health care workers
• How to work together for the sake of patient-oriented care
• Proper communication across various fields of specialization
• Professional respect that transcends perceived hierarchies among workers
• Appreciation for the shared knowledge health care workers can offer each other
• Understanding that differing opinions do not constitute disrespect

In short, students in IPE programs learn that while their specific roles may vary, their goals should remain focused and aligned. However, while this sounds like a simple enough idea, there unfortunately do exist several barriers to successful implementation.

Challenges to Successful Program Implementation

If interprofessional collaboration were as easy as it should be, the World Health Organization would not require a framework of more than five dozen pages to outline how students might best be educated on its successful practice. A number of potential roadblocks stand between students and success. For instance:

• Understanding and interacting with the varying cultures between professions
• Overcoming the societal perception of hierarchies between roles
• The need for educators to successfully communicate across various fields
• Educating students with differing levels of knowledge and experience
• The risk of unintentionally blurring the roles of various workers

In short, successful IPE programs must teach health care workers across professions to work as a collaborative unit while still maintaining clear distinctions between the responsibilities associated with each role. For instance, physicians should not perceive themselves as more important than nurses, yet nurses should not think it okay to operate outside their bounds.

How IPE Programs Affect the Patient

The goal of educating health care workers should always be to improve patient care. Interprofessional education benefits patients by teaching medical professionals to better cooperate in both the development and implementation of a patient’s health care plan.

Not only does this potentially increase patient safety, but successful collaboration at both the planning and treatment stages may also streamline the treatment process. This has the potential to improve the cost-effectiveness of health care treatment, a particular concern to patients in the United States.

Furthermore, the communication skills developed in IPE programs may inadvertently improve health care professionals’ bedside manner and have an impact in the workforce.  In the process of learning to communicate their roles to those operating outside of them, students may likewise gain a better understanding of how to communicate medical concerns to laypersons as well.

IPE and Health Care’s Future

One of the primary roadblocks to successful implementation of IPE programs across the field of health care education remains the perception of hierarchies between nurses and physicians. This perception unfortunately biases some students against willingly participating in such programs as they’re meant to be experienced.

However, continued emphasis on the value of collaborative education may erode these perceptions over time. While IPE continues to evolve more slowly than some may prefer, numerous educators and working professionals continue to support its implementation.

Unfortunately, additional research is needed to fully gauge the potential impact of IPE programs on the health care industry as a whole. Many proposed benefits, such as improved cost-effectiveness, remain largely hypothetical. Nonetheless, improvements in collaboration and professional respect seen in the classroom can still translate to the clinical environment.

For IPE programs to truly impact the future of health care, we must first see more commitment from educational facilities to the spread and evolution of interprofessional teaching. In short, IPE cannot impact the future of health care without first occupying a greater role in the education of the industry’s leaders.

Are IPE Programs the Future of Education?

A 2018 BMC Nursing journal identified several common roadblocks to the spread of IPE programs, but two stand out above the rest. Firstly, IPE cannot simply replace current educational curricula. Instead, educators must learn to synchronize current teaching methods with those employed in IPE programs.

Synchronization demands that educators account for the potential knowledge gaps between students entering various professions. Many institutions attempt this by simply waiting until students’ final year of formal education to allow entry into IPE programs. This prevents educators from having to explain the same concepts across multiple levels of understanding.

Secondly, as suggested by the issue raised above, the future spread of IPE demands an increase in the number of educators qualified to teach at the interprofessional level. Educators cannot teach budding professionals to effectively communicate across fields if they cannot achieve the same quality of communication with their students.

In short, IPE programs most certainly can be the future of health care education, provided more institutions take the time and care to develop such programs effectively. Until then, the number of leading educational facilities dedicated to collaborative teaching remains relatively exclusive. It may be years before these changes in any radically measurable fashion.

Interprofessional Practice and Education at Western University of Health Sciences

Because formalized IPE programs have yet to become as widespread as they arguably should be, they add a strong bullet point to the resumes of students fortunate enough to participate in them. Western University of Health Sciences graduates may count themselves among that exclusive class of health care professionals with experience in virtual, team-based education.

Since the very first year Western University began offering IPE (2009), our programs have been dedicated to creating more employable health care workers with the collaborative skills needed to minimize health care costs while maximizing patient safety. The result is graduates with competitive CVs and a cooperative outlook on the best approach to proper health care.