Promoting the Health Professions Accreditors Collaborative and National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education Guidelines: Re-envisioning the Quality and Assessment of Institution-level IPE Curriculum

The 2019 Health Professions Accreditors Collaborative (HPAC) and National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (NCIPE) best-practice guidelines recommend that institutions deliberately design the interprofessional education (IPE) curriculum to include intentionally created and sequenced longitudinal learning experiences that are integrated into existing professional program curricula. A challenge often faced by institutions striving for this goal is a lack of awareness of the many opportunities currently existing in curricula. Discovering, evaluating, and cataloging the full range of quality interprofessional activities offered across health professional programs within an institution is a difficult endeavor for even the most sophisticated IPE programs due to the significant variance in experience parameters across an institution and a lack of specific, standardized criteria by which to evaluate the quality of IPE opportunities.

This presentation describes the systematic approach used to re-envision the institution-wide IPE program at one large academic institution. Specific initiatives described include the creation and implementation of 1) a recruitment and data collection tool to discover and inventory existing IPE initiatives, 2) IPE activity evaluative criteria for inclusion into the official institution-wide IPE program, and 3) the process by which the centralized interprofessional education leadership team collects, communicates, stores, and shares the information with institution-wide stakeholders.

Implementation of these restructured initiatives to date has allowed the institutional interprofessional leadership team to inventory hundreds of existing IPE learning opportunities across campus, successfully apply the newly established evaluative review criteria to submissions for potential inclusion in the institution-level IPE program, and continually refine tools and processes through repeated Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) quality improvement cycles. Our presented tools and processes, outcomes, and lessons learned will serve as a model to guide the leaders of other institutions to plan and conduct a similar process in order to expand their number of quality IPE experiences according to best-practice HPAC and NCIPE guidelines.