Saturday, 23 February 2019: 2:15 PM
Working together for the benefit of providing quality patient care is important. Many nursing programs do not include teaching interdisciplinary methods of care to its students. Interprofessional education (IPE) is a curricular design used to develop students in health care professional studies as members of interprofessional teams. There is a need for interdisciplinary and interprofessional education to improve interprofessional communication. The Institutes of Medicine (IOM) (2011) recommended that education be improved upon and include nursing residency programs to facilitate interprofessional collaboration among caregivers. The curricular design, which includes IPE, places members or students of more than one health care or social care related setting in one classroom for the purposes of sharing skills and knowledge between professions. With the management of care serving to emerge as a critical component in health care delivery, nurses must exhibit leadership and skill in interdisciplinary and collaborative practice for the improvement of health care delivery and quality. The future of nursing and other health care related disciplines depends upon the team approach to the provision of patient care. Teaching IPE throughout the nursing curriculum will serve to increase the students ability to engage other clinicians from the various disciplines. Engaging in IPE ultimately will serve to sharpen the focus on the needs of the patients via a collective and collaborative effort. The integration of IPE in the nursing curriculum will serve to elevate the climate of mutual respect and shared values among caregivers. Interprofessional education will serve to bridge the gap that exists among caregivers as it relates to communication and improvement of patient outcomes. This presentation/ lecture will provide the positive and negative outcomes related to introducing IPE into the curriculum, discuss evidence-based approaches to implementation of IPE in nursing academics, identify the legal and ethical issues associated with IPE, and review what a possible evaluation plan might look like for an IPE curriculum. This presentation/lecture will also serve to identify how integrating IPE in a nursing curriculum will improve interprofessional communication in the healthcare environment.