Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice
Overview
Changing the way we educate health providers is key to achieving system change and to ensuring that health providers have the necessary knowledge and training to work effectively in interprofessional teams within the evolving health care system.
This component of the proposed Pan-Canadian HHR Strategy will facilitate and support the implementation of a strategy on Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice (IECPCP) across all health care sectors.
Collaborative patient-centred practice
Collaborative patient-centered practice is designed to promote the active participation of several health care disciplines and professions. It enhances patient-, family-, and community-centred goals and values, provides mechanisms for continuous communication among health care providers, optimizes staff participation in clinical decision making (within and across disciplines), and fosters respect for the contributions of all providers. There is growing consensus that interprofessional collaborative patient-centered practice - across all health sectors and along the continuum of care - will contribute to the following:
- improved population health / patient care;
- improved access to health care;
- improved recruitment and retention of health care providers;
- improved patient safety and communication among health care providers;
- more efficient and effective employment of health human resources; and
- improved satisfaction among patients and health care providers.
A closely related concept is that of collaborative care, which extends the collaboration to include patients, families, friends and informal caregivers.
A key aspect of collaborative care and collaborative patient-centered practice is Supporting Self-Care, which has been the focus of an important initiative led by Health Canada from 1995 to 2002.
Interprofessional Education
Interprofessional education has been described as learning together to promote collaboration. It involves health care providers learning to work together, sharing in problem solving and decision making, to the benefit of patients, as follows:
- socializing health care providers in working together, in shared problem solving and decision making, towards enhancing the benefit for patients, and other recipients of services;
- developing mutual understanding
of, and respect for,
the contributions of various disciplines; and
- instilling the requisite competencies for collaborative practice.
Interprofessional education should occur before and after entry-to-practice, at the level of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education, and across a continuum of care.
The specific objectives of the IECPCP initiative are as follows:
- promoting and demonstrating the benefits of interprofessional education for collaborative patient-centred practice;
- increasing the number of educators prepared to teach from an interprofessional collaborative patient-centred perspective;
- increasing the number of health professionals trained for collaborative patient-centred practice before, and after,
entry-to-practice;
- stimulating networking and sharing of best educational approaches for collaborative patient-centred practice; and
- facilitating interprofessional collaborative care in both the education and practice settings.
Accomplishments to Date
Significant background work was conducted in the first year of the initiative, ensuring a solid foundation from which to build IECPCP. Promising practices in interprofessional education and collaborative patient-centred practice have been identified through a literature review and an environmental scan resulting in a 304-page IECPCP report. The Executive Summary and Chapter 10 of the report with the accompanying IECPCP Model (PDF Version) have been included below for your reference. In addition to the IECPCP report based on the literature review and environmental scan, a series of research papers exploring key concepts within the IECPCP have been commissioned. A synthesis of these papers by Dr. Vernon Curran is included below for your reference.
In-depth consultation of provincial and territorial governments has been conducted through the National Expert Committee (NEC) on Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centred Practice. Consultations with experts representing professional and national stakeholders have occurred through a series of in-depth interviews, surveys, and bilateral meetings. Health Canada will continue to consult and collaborate with such stakeholders in the further development, implementation, and evaluation of the IECPCP initiative.
Links and Resources
Other Related Publications
 Patient-Centered Medicine : Transforming the Clinical Method (Second edition, Radcliffe, 2003)
Authored by Moira A. Stewart, Judith Belle Brown, W. Wayne Weston, Ian R. McWhinney, Carol L. McWilliam, Thomas R. Freeman (University of Western Ontario), this book describes and explains the patient-centered model of medicine; comprehensively covers the six interactive components of the clinical method, and learning and teaching the method; and examines and evaluates qualitative and quantitative research on the patient-centered clinical method, including reviews and recent studies. The first edition was published in Canada ( Sage, 1995)
Organizations
College of Health Disciplines, University of British Columbia
(Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)
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