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CIPE > Who are we? > Leadership Statement

Leadership Statement

Interprofessional education is a value and strength of the Academic Health Center. It is part of the AHC strategic plan and we have achieved numerous successes in this area. We are now ready to deepen our commitment to and support for interprofessional education and to embed it in our educational programs.

Defined for the AHC as the process by which two or more health professions learn with and about each other across the spectrum of their education to improve collaboration, practice and the quality of patient-centered care, our interprofessional education programs will lead to the following student outcomes: students will know about the roles of other health professionals; students will be able to work with other health professionals in the context of a team where each member has a clearly defined role; students will learn how to apply disciplinary strengths of health professionals for their highest and best value in health promotion, prevention, and care delivery.

We support the following commitments to strengthen interprofessional education:

• Creating room in our educational schedules for interprofessional education.
• Making interprofessional education offerings a mandatory part of our degree programs.
• Providing the time necessary for direct contact activities.
• Rewarding and recognizing faculty for their involvement in interprofessional education.
• Including interprofessional education in each department’s 7.12 promotion and tenure statement.
• Providing faculty development in interprofessional education.
• Assigning faculty teaching time to interprofessional education.
• Working together to share best practices, to plan joint initiatives, to learn from each other and to solve administrative challenges.
• Designing and conducting outcome assessments that demonstrate the value added of interprofessional education.
• Recognizing and celebrating our current successes in interprofessional education.

As we design and implement new interprofessional education courses and experiences:

• We will consider the impact and value of experiences in different community settings, the appropriate timing of the interprofessional experience in the learning timeline of health professionals, and the impact of diverse populations and cultural competencies on the experience.
• We will focus on the space between the individual health professional expertise, while maximizing the use of the core of each health professional.
• We will employ the most effective educational format for the experience, drawing upon on-line, direct contact, and other formats.
• We will consider how a competency is learned and reinforced throughout the continuum of a health professional’s learning experience.

Strengthening interprofessional education addresses a number of powerful forces and currents, including, the need to improve the quality and safety of health care, the need to have more efficient care delivery with decreased cost and improved value; market place, consumer and student demand; the importance of interdisciplinary education and research activities to Transforming the U; the shift in this direction by accrediting bodies in their definition of competencies and capabilities; the recognition that teaming is a learned behavior and needs a planned approach in a learning environment; the call for accountability and demonstrating the value of how we are educating health professionals; Strengthening interprofessional education and new models of care delivery will also help forecast workforce needs and impact workforce planning. As each profession addresses workforce issues, attention needs to be paid to deploying teams, emerging professional roles, and the appropriate professions for care delivery models. This type of planning is very different from each profession planning in isolation from each other.

Our first priority initiatives for strengthening interprofessional education are organized into two areas, Common Ground Interprofessional Education and New Models of Care Delivery.

• Common Ground projects will include: Leadership and teambuilding; Principles of quality improvement and patient safety using such tools as evidence, informatics, root cause analysis; Baseline health informatics; Health policy and society, including global health, health diversity, public health, health economics, societal health; Care systems, including supply lines, care integration, government regulation, managed care, networks, insurance.
• New Models of Care Delivery projects will include: Developing an outcomes and performance-based system that evaluates the competencies and assesses capabilities as demonstrated in practice to substantiate the value-added of interprofessional education; Developing models for chronic care, for example, obesity, diabetes, care of the elderly/aging; Inpatient critical care; and health promotion, prevention and maintenance.

We will create an AHC Center for Interprofessional Education to facilitate these initiatives and to provide ongoing logistical and administrative support for interprofessional education.