Interdisciplinary collisions: bringing healthcare professionals together

Since the publication of its reports, Health professions education: A bridge to quality (2003) and To err is human: Building a safer health system (2000), the Institute of Medicine has continued to emphasize interprofessional education (IPE), founded on quality improvement and informatics, as a better way to prepare healthcare professionals for practice. As this trend continues, healthcare education will need to implement administrative and educational processes that encourage different professions to collaborate and share resources. With greater numbers of students enrolled in health professional programs, combined with ethical imperatives for learning and reduced access to quality clinical experiences, medical and nursing education increasingly rely on simulation education to implement interdisciplinary patient safety initiatives. In this article, the authors describe one approach, based on the Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice released by the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (2011), toward providing IPE to an audience of diverse healthcare professionals in academia and clinical practice. This approach combines professional standards with the authors' practical experience serving on a key operations committee, comprising members from a school of medicine, a school of nursing, and a large healthcare system, to design and implement a new state-of-the-art simulation center and its IPE-centered curriculum.