Health care improvement and continuing interprofessional education: Continuing interprofessional development to improve patient outcomes

Abstract

Health care improvement and continuing professional education must be better understood if we are to promote continuous service improvement through interprofessional learning in the workplace. We propose that situating interprofessional working, interprofessional learning, work‐based learning, and service improvement within a framework of social learning theory creates a continuum between work‐based interprofessional learning and service improvement in which each is integral to the other. This continuum provides a framework for continuing interprofessional development that enables service improvement in the workplace to serve as a vehicle through which individual professionals and teams can continually enhance patient care through working and learning together. The root of this lies in understanding that undertaking improvement and learning about improvement are co‐dependent and that health care professionals must recognize their responsibility to improve as well as complete their everyday work. We believe that significant opportunities exist for health care commissioners, service providers, and educational institutions to work together to promote continuing interprofessional development in the workplace to enhance patient outcomes, and we outline some of the opportunities we believe exist.

A Survey of the Perception of Interprofessional Education among Faculty Members of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences

“…In fact, interprofessional education occurs only when two or more professionals work together to learn about or from each other so that they may enhance the quality of services through increased collaboration (5). Some positive outcomes of this form of education are as follows: enhancing problem-solving skills and clinical decision-making, improving the quality of healthcare, improving patient safety, promoting communication skills, and enhancing the perception of different roles among professionals in healthcare settings (6)(7)(8)(9)(10).…”

Continuing medical education costs and benefits: Lessons for competing in a changing health care economy

“…1-10 CME planners are advised to develop more continuing interprofessional education to support the interprofessional delivery of health care [2][3][4] and to measure processes of evaluating participant satisfaction, assessments of knowledge, indications of physician-learner performance in a clinical setting, and patient outcomes.…”

Nursing Faculty's Needs of Knowledge, Beliefs, and Readiness to Implement Interprofessional Education in their Teaching: An Exploratory Study

“…Role clarification (Solomon et al, 2010), enhancement of problem solving skills and clinical decision-making (Lapkin, Levett-Jones, & Gilligan, 2013), increased quality of care (Wilcock, Janes, & Chambers, 2009), and improved patient safety (Anderson, Thorpe, Heney, & Petersen, 2009;Kyrkjebø et al, 2006) have been documented. IPE is correlated with positive changes in "attitudes, awareness, and knowledge" among health sciences students (Reeves et al, 2011, p. 171).…”