Nursing - Interprofessional Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Nursing - Interprofessional Education - Essay Example Further, nurses must broaden their skills and scope of practice while collaborating with a team of different health professionals. The ultimate solution lies in promote academic progression within nursing that recognizes the complex and evolving nature of nursing practice. Efforts aimed at promoting the team-based education for health professionals are not new or unique. The development in this area of education has been driven by concerns that the existing healthcare workforce must meet patient and community health in a cost-effective manner and that educational institutions must take more responsibility to produce a skilled workforce (Interpersonal Education Collaborative Expert Panel, 2011). Interprofessional education (IPE) has been described in a variety of ways. The World Health Organization (2010) defined IPE as occurring when professionals from different professional backgrounds learn about each other and from each other to enable collaborative improvement in health outcomes. Lowe et al (2012) described IPE as the interrelationship occurring between professionals and learners, able to learn from each other via effective collaboration to improve health outcomes. The purpose of IPE is therefore to facilitate the preparation of health workforce with regard to their ability to respond to local health needs (Lowe et al, 2012). The World Health Organization (2010) identifies interprofessional collaboration as an important strategy for mitigating global health challenges, especially regarding improvement of health outcomes and developing strong health system. Arguably, most of the health care in the U.S. is delivered via multidisciplinary approach (Pecukonis et al., 2008; Isaacs and Benjamin, 1991). This approach involves multidisciplinary work that runs parallel to client systems. More importantly, the communication work in this approach is embedded within a leadership hierarchy (Pecukonis et al., 2008). Within this system of health care, team members are res ponsible for activities related to their discipline, and there is little sense of shared responsibilities for team development or even patient outcomes. The notion of interprofessional education and its impact on the provision of services is not novel or unique. Pecukonis et al (2008) notes that interprofessional teams and collaborative groups were used as early as the mid 20th century at the level of community health care especially to underserved populations. From a historical perspective, inter-professional education was originally illustrated in the 1972 Conference Steering Committee recommendations (Interpersonal Education Collaborative Expert Panel, 2011; Davidson, 2005). The Conference made multilevel recommendations including organizational, administrative, instructional, and interpersonal. At the instructional and organizational level, the committee recommended obligations of academic institutions with regard to conducting interdisciplinary education and patient care aimed at developing methods to link education with requirements essential for practice. Other recommendations included use of ambulatory settings as sites for inter-professional education, an effort aimed at integrating classroom instruction to develop faculty skills. At the national level, the recommendations emphasized on the need to developing national framework for sharing practice models and instructional capacities, supporting government agency for innovative instructional and