Building Interprofessional Teams Through Partnerships to Address Quality

Interprofessional collaborative education and practice is essential in the current complex healthcare climate. Barriers to interprofessional education include difficulty scheduling joint activities amid the silos of discipline-specific curricula and the lack of urgency by faculty to find innovative ways to commit to interprofessional training. Barriers in practice include poor understanding of the roles of different professionals and lack of awareness of the concept because the people in the workforce were mostly educated before interprofessional practice and education were prioritized by national bodies representing academic professions. The author of this paper describes opportunities for interprofessional education and practice and describes a way to create an educational-practice partnership to drive quality in healthcare settings.