Abstract
As health care professionals continue to focus on quality, safety, and access to affordable health care, interprofessional practice seems to be the imperative practice linkage. The current health care arena presents a complex environment plagued with communication breakdowns that lead to errors in care and errors of omission in health care. These communication breakdowns are frequently the result of communication silos that exist within disciplines. The integration of electronic health records is one strategy to address these communication breakdowns. However, the root of change must be health care professionals’ behaviors—we must practice within an interprofessional framework.
Interprofessional education is described as health care professionals learning with, from, and about each other within an educational environment. The didactic curriculum of interprofessional education emphasizes interprofessional team building skills, knowledge of professions, patient-centered care, service learning, the impact of culture on health care delivery, and interprofessional clinical practice. In a didactic community-based interprofessional experience, health professional students learn about the community, the interaction of the patient’s environment and health, and how the availability of resources affect one’s health status and the role that each respective health discipline plays within the community. Interprofessional education facilitates each of the respective health care disciplines to formulate their unique discipline’s professional identity while ensuring that each of the respective disciplines formulates their professional team identity. This cannot end on graduation with a health professional degree. Interprofessional education must translate into interprofessional practice after graduation.
The continuation of interprofessional education into the health care environment is interprofessional practice. Interprofessional practice involves health care professionals from various disciplines practicing with each other in a respectful interprofessional relationship of clinical consultation, collaboration, and coordination of care within a patient-centered team. Interprofessional practice is frequently described as a process that includes communication and decision making, enabling a synergistic influence of grouped cumulative knowledge and skills. Critical elements of inter-professional practice include professional responsibility, accountability, coordination, collaboration, consultation, communication, cooperation, assertiveness, autonomy, and mutual trust and respect. It is this interprofessional partnership that creates an interprofessional team designed to work on common goals to improve patient outcomes.
Interprofessional practice must become the expectation of quality, safe, access to health care. Health care professionals and administrators should adopt a philosophy of care centered on interprofessional practice. It is imperative that health care leaders require all health care professionals to practice with interprofessional practice as a core competency necessary for credentialing of each health care professional.