Exploring the Clinical Interprofessional Education Environment
BACKGROUND: The next generation of health care workers will require interprofessional education (IPE) to prepare for interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). To date, IPE growth and development in the United States has been primarily preclinical. Leading organizations recognize, however, that IPE must move meaningfully into clinical learning environments to improve health outcomes. The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) is dedicated to advancing IPE, including clinical IPE, as evidenced in the institution’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), Linking Interprofessional Networks for Collaboration (LINC). LINC strives to develop IPE knowledge and skills of faculty, staff, and students; to increase IPE student learning experiences; and to integrate IPE activities into formal curricula across 5 schools of dentistry, graduate biomedical sciences, health professions, medicine, and nursing. In 2019, the LINC Faculty Council, composed of one faculty member from each school, created the Clinical IPE Initiative to better understand and advance interprofessional clinical learning. Additional faculty from across UT Health San Antonio were recruited by LINC to join a dedicated workgroup charged to conduct a local accounting of clinical IPE activities, create faculty development resources, and complete a literature review to inform and strengthen these efforts.
DESIGN: We searched PubMed, SCOPUS, and CINAHL databases to identify articles published since 2015 describing the clinical IPE
environment. In two rounds of decision-making, three interprofessional pairs applied our inclusion/exclusion criteria of (1) two or
more professions, (2) two or more groups of learners, and (3) patient involvement. Round one applied criteria to identified
titles/abstracts; round two to remaining full texts. Tie breaks were decided across pairs by a designated team member. A data
extraction tool was developed and applied to our final set of included articles.
RESULTS: Our search strategy yielded 1610 publications. After title/abstract review, 285 articles remained. Subsequent full text review resulted in 109 included articles. Data extraction from these 109 articles will be completed prior to presentation, with patterns and trends reported alongside reflections and implications for stakeholders locally and nationally.
CONCLUSIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Preliminary results from this scoping review highlight challenges unique to the clinical IPE environment. The need for clarity regarding definitional boundaries around the term “learner” has emerged, for example, as an early trend worthy of further exploration. Complete results are expected to inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of meaningful clinical IPE, as well as faculty development efforts to strengthen interprofessional clinical learning environments.
