Interprofessional education: the fourth focus

Three complementary and overlapping foci for interprofessional education (IPE)--preparing individuals for collaborative practice; learning to work in teams; and developing services to improve care--have been presented previously as a threefold classification derived from a systematic review (Barr et al., 2005). This paper adds discussion of a fourth: improving the quality of life in communities. The fourth focus is less often found in the literature and is described more fully in this paper. It embodies six approaches to interprofessional learning, discussed in the paper, that are thought to be particularly relevant to the work of Pathways into Health with American Indian and Alaska Native tribes, and more widely wherever collaborative learning and practice are invoked to improve quality of community life.