Development and implementation of an interprofessional education (IPE) curriculum: theory and practice

Abstract

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Introduction: Modern healthcare has been shifting to the team-based patient care which requires team members to effectively interact with each other. Learning team skills at the point of healthcare can compromise patient safety, therefore interprofessional education (IPE) was created. IPE is an activity where learners from two or more healthcare professions learn with and from each other (WHO, 2010). IPE requires careful design and integration into the existing curricula. It involves multiple health care programs with different scheduling timelines, existing curricula, scopes of practice, accreditation requirements, teaching environments and cultures. The University of South Dakota (USD) has conducted a university-wide assessment for readiness for IPE and created an ICU bedside rounding IPE curriculum. The authors strive to conceptualize knowledge and skills acquired during these two projects to contribute to the generalized knowledge of the theory and practice of the IPE curriculum development.

Methods: IPE curriculum development starts with establishing an interprofessional design panel that includes subject experts, educators, simulationists, assessment and evaluation specialists, and administrators. The team needs to identify types of learners involved in the curriculum and assess their educational needs. Curriculum mapping, surveys, direct observation, and expert panel discussion can be used to assess learners’ needs. Curriculum mapping helps to assess the existing curriculum’s content, outcomes and redundancies but it cannot answer if the learning objectives are achieved. Assessment, to measure whether the learning objectives are achieved, is done with outcome analysis which uses competency assessment, exit surveys, and post-graduation follow-up surveys. After educational needs are assessed and learning objectives are formulated, an assessment instrument must be developed to measure if learners achieved the desired outcomes. Needs analysis, identifying the learning objectives, and developing an assessment instrument are required pre-requisites for the next step, design and content development. Design and content development create a conceptual framework through which the learners would achieve desired outcomes. During this process, curriculum developers will identify pre-requisites for each activity, the sequence of the activities that build on each other’s experiences, and the appropriate teaching methods that allow the learning objectives to be achieved. IPE has a strong social learning component that is embedded into the clinical context and cannot exist without it. The IPE curriculum has two underlying processes, developing clinical expertise and developing IPE competencies, that have different dynamics and mutually affect each other. During the IPE curriculum design, the steps described above need to be performed separately for clinical and for IPE components. After implementation, the curriculum should undergo a thorough evaluation if learning objectives have been met.

Results: Using the conceptual framework described above, the University of South Dakota conducted a university-wide assessment of readiness for IPE and developed then implemented an IPE curriculum for its health care programs. Obtained results have confirmed the survey-based prediction that conducting IPE training several months prior to graduation would allow students to develop competencies required for collaborative practice at the point of patient care.

Conclusions: IPE curriculum design is a complex and multifaceted process. It involves learners’ developing clinical and IPE-related competencies. Learning IPE-related skills is a social learning process that occurs in the clinical context. Clinical and IPE competencies have different dynamics of development and should be monitored and addressed as two distinctive processes that mutually affect each other.