Evaluating the Impact of Interprofessional Continuing Professional Development: Challenges and Opportunities

One of the greatest challenges associated with interprofessional continuing professional development (CPD) is the ability to assess impact on interprofessional knowledge, competencies, skills, and practice, particularly for institutions that produce a large number of activities serving diverse target audiences.

The University of Pittsburgh and UPMC annually offer approximately 1500 courses, series, and web modules to over 200,000 participants. In preparation for Joint Accreditation we have spent considerable time understanding how to implement interprofessional evaluation tools that are logistically feasible and also provide substantive information at both the activity and program levels. We began with an open-ended question about impact of the activity on interprofessional team function and subsequently adopted selected questions from the ICCAS instrument that represent each of the four IPEC competency domains. We have developed methodology to assess outcomes at the activity level as well as within activity categories and sub-categories to help us understand which venues may be most conducive to interprofessional education and in what areas we might strengthen impact. We believe that this work is highly translatable to other large CPD programs and is an important contribution to assessment methodologies.