Southeast Consortium for Interprofessional Education: Using Interprofessional e-Learning Communities to Teach Collaborative Practice, Principles

Future health care professionals require enhanced training in various interprofessional team settings in order to adapt to diverse practice environments and improve patient safety. However, effective interprofessional education presents a number of logistical challenges, including variable scheduling across educational programs, students’ proximity to main campuses and each other during experiential training, and the paucity of collaborative practice settings [1-4]. The Southeast Consortium for Interprofessional Education (SEC-IPE), a multi-institution collaborative committed to enhancing interprofessional education for health professionals through multi-institutional resource sharing, will use “Principles of Patient Safety and Quality” and “Improving Transitions of Care” to teach Core Collaborative Practice Competencies [5] to more than 5,000 medical, nursing, pharmacy and other health professions students during their early clinical training. Specifically, the SEC-IPE will design eight interactive e-Learning modules to accomplish learning outcomes at the novice and intermediate levels of proficiency as described by the National Institutes of Health Proficiency Scale [6]. Each of the modules will be able to either: 1) stand alone, 2) integrate into existing courses, or 3) be embedded as part of a longitudinal, blended curriculum consisting of face-to-face orientations, computer-mediated e- Learning communities, and interprofessional learning experiences and/or other simulated experiences. Evaluation of the modules and the project will include the collection and analysis of a mixture of quantitative and qualitative metrics agreed upon across the partner institutions of the SEC-IPE.