• Traditionally, healthcare professionals don’t learn with other professions, making them unprepared for interprofessional teamwork at the workplace
• Interprofessional education (IPE) has been shown to improve patient outcomes and should be priorities in the clinical environment
• IPE is best introduced early, but teaching and assessing it are still a challenge

Prof Celia Tan
Group Director, Allied Health
SingHealth

Traditionally, healthcare professionals are trained only with others from the same specialty. Graduates are mainly assessed on individual professional competency. Because of these, the first time a doctor, nurse or allied health professional (AHP) works with one another will be on an actual patient, at work.

When healthcare professionals are unprepared for the dynamics of working in a collaborative unit, teamwork can break down and errors in clinical judgment or gaps in patient care may go unchecked.

The World Health Organisation defines interprofessional education (IPE) as: “When students from two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes.”

With IPE, clinicians acquire competencies to build positive attitudes, greater respect towards other professions and increase their awareness of the importance of teamwork.

Each clinician in the patient care team is like a piece of a puzzle that needs to fit with others to form the big picture. When clinicians enhance their interprofessional teamwork competencies, collaboration becomes more effective – bringing better patient outcomes and safety.

A Cochrane review by Reeves et al (2009), reported that four out of six IPE studies showed that staff morale and patient satisfaction improved and that teams collaborate better.

The review also revealed that IPE reduces rate of clinical error for emergency department teams.

Ideally, a good place to start introducing IPE is in academic institutions, where students can begin learning side-by-side with students from other specialties.

The difficulty, though, is in conducting formal assessments of these IPE teams. How should the medical, nursing and allied health student be graded and what competencies should we look for in a teamwork module? If we don’t assess it, how do we ensure they have learnt it?

Besides assessment, there is also the practical difficulty of finding a common time for different healthcare students, as well as the need to change academic policies and fit the IPE module into an already packed curriculum.

It is in the clinical environment that IPE should and must be prioritised to ensure high quality and safe patient care. A mindset change for educators is also necessary because we are so used to teaching within our own professional areas.

Good patient care starts with good team building policies at the academic and clinical setting. Once interprofessional competencies and training checklists are identified, clinicians should include them into the clinical training programme before students graduate from their courses.

We cannot deny that good teamwork can have an immediate and positive impact on patient safety. Let us take the first step to close the gap and move forward in interprofessional collaborative practice for our patients!