If you have joined me in previous blogs, I hope I have imparted a deeper understanding of interprofessional education and why it is significant to developing future health professionals who are collaborative-practice ready.
However, you may be still wondering about our current health workforce. What is the relevance to their professional practice? Why should current practitioners care about interprofessional education and how it’s happening within educational institutions?
New horizons
By adopting the mindset that today’s students are tomorrow’s team members, interprofessional education can mean a lot. New professionals who are educated in programs and models where collaborative practice and interprofessional teamworking is emphasized stand to help build foundations for the kind of collaborative, wholistic, patient-centered care that is needed. Moreover, interprofessional and collaborative models of care are coming to define the future of healthcare practice across our contemporary healthcare systems.
Practicing professionals stand to benefit when new colleagues enter practice already accustomed to collaboration and team-based approaches. New professionals who have had opportunities to experience interprofessional socialization and begun to foster a collaborative, interprofessional identity hold potential to be change agents within their new settings of practice. This can include helping to shape more inclusive and respectful workplace culture- challenging known barriers to collaboration such as professional hierarchies, stereotypes and social siloes.
A two-way street
However, the responsibility for establishing interprofessional collaboration as a practice standard goes both ways. Research by our team and others has identified that the benefits of pre-licensure interprofessional education can only extend so far. Much like developing a new skill or habit, reinforcement and repetition in practice is needed. There is a responsibility on current practitioners to help guide behaviour, including role modelling of collaborative communication, attitudes and including others in decision-making. Modelling in practice is essential so that the skills students develop within programs can be sustained and further developed in practice settings.
Professionals who support collaboration, and whom seek out, and are open to learning with, from and about new colleagues and other professions are better prepared to thrive in practice. Enhancing access to care, patient outcomes and lessening burden and burnout on individual practitioners can start with interprofessional exposure- and a mindset of embracing new ideas, approaches to practice and opportunities to work together.
As we look to the needs of today and tomorrow, developing interprofessional education in pre-licensure and ongoing exposure for professionals in practice is as much a priority as setting goals for collaborative health systems in the future.
Photo by Mix and Match Studio
