Interprofessional Education Essay

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Interprofessional education occurs when two or more professionals learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes” 34. It has been shown to have beneficial effects on both patient outcomes and professional practice 35,36,37. According to Headrick, et al. 38, effective interprofessional education “works to improve the quality of care; focuses on the needs of service users and carers; involves service users and carers; promotes interprofessional collaboration; encourages professions to learn with, from, and about one another; enhances practice within professions; respects the integrity and contribution of each profession; and increases professional

Its essence has been acknowledged by many notable organizations such as the WHO 40, the National Academies of Practice 41, the American Public Health Association 39, and the Institute of Medicine 42. This essay explores how the cardiac team can use interprofessional education to optimize the care of the cardiac patient. Cardiology is designated as one of the most popular subspecialties of medicine 43, yet cardiovascular-related illnesses remain the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide 44. Hence, it is essential to explore how to use several strategies, such as interprofessional education, to improve and optimize the care of the cardiac patient. Interprofessional education can be modeled, nurtured, and inculcated into students’ training at their pre-professional levels. The essence of this activity is not just to transfer certain knowledge from other professions but to also start early grooming the students on the place of collaboration in healthcare delivery. There are frequent expectations and assumptions that by the virtue of their training, different divisions of healthcare professionals already understand how to work together as a

These barriers typically revolve around heavy logistics, scheduling, and leadership or managerial arrangements 37,46 and these usually explain why interprofessional education activities are low in schools despite the acknowledgement of its benefits. Additionally, interprofessional education can and should be included as a possible content of continuing professional development (CPD) activities. Some studies 38,47,48 further propose that beyond including interprofessional education as a content of CPD activities, the CPD activities themselves should be decentralized and designed to accommodate more than one profession. For instance, CPD activities are traditionally departmentalized, such as the continuing medical education typically set out for medical doctors alone; however, evidence now shows that traditional CME is no longer sufficient to address all of physicians' education and professional development demands in contemporary healthcare