State of the Science: Interprofessional Education in Nursing

Background/Significance: The National Academy of Medicine’s (formerly the Institute of Medicine) The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health called for a fundamental transformation of the nursing profession in 4 key areas: practice, education, leadership, and the need for data on the health care workforce. Teamwork was cited as a key factor in transforming the area of practice. Interprofessional education (IPE) is a strategy to address teamwork to transform practice. This review focused on the key area of transforming practice through teamwork and IPE. It was based on three classic definitions regarding practice that are vital to IPE.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) (2010, p. 7) defined IPE as occurring when “students from two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes.” 
•  The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) (2011) produced Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice. Building on the WHO (2010, p.7) definition of interprofessional collaborative practice “When multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds work together with patients, families, carers, and communities to deliver the highest quality of care.”
• IPEC (2011, p. 24) defined interprofessional teamwork as, “The levels of cooperation, coordination and collaboration characterizing the relationships between professions in delivering patient-centered care.”

Objective: The purpose of this systematic review was to search, extract, appraise, and synthesize research related to interprofessional education (IPE) between January 2011 and August 2016 in order to report the current state of the science related to IPE in nursing.

Design: This review was reported in line with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA).

Data Sources: A literature search was completed with assistance of a professional academic librarian in seven databases: PubMed, CINAHL, ProQuest, Ovid, ERIC, Science Direct, and Scopus using a combination of medical subject headings, or Mesh terms, as well as keywords to retrieve non-indexed citations.

Review Methods: The inclusion criteria for this review were broad in order to completely assess IPE and disseminate information on future research needed. The inclusion criteria were as follows: IPE that included nurses (in academia or in practice) in the sample population, original research, limited to the English language from 2009 to August 2016.

Results: The database search strategy yielded 202 citations. These results were narrowed to 49 studies based on inclusion criteria.

Conclusions: Findings suggest more studies with rigorous research designs are needed. There is a need to compare outcomes following interprofessional interventions and to elicit findings related to the effectiveness of IPE on patient outcomes. These studies will provide evidence at the higher levels of Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation.