Leveraging interprofessional education to build high functioning teams

As a psychologist, the author says that her role in the integrated primary care team has always been that of the behavioral health provider, serving to promote the holistic health of the patients and families with whom she works as part of the larger integrated team. Central to both Primary Care Behavioral Health and the Collaborative Care model-as well as other models of integration-is that the health care team works to address fragmented care in order to most comprehensively address patient needs. And yet we often focus on training to the model in which behavioral health providers work. As we think about the future of integrated health care workforce development, shouldn't we instead focus on training future health care professionals to develop and lead high functioning teams? As we work toward more comprehensively addressing the holistic needs of marginalized populations, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to consider how our functions and roles be leveraged across diverse models of integration, team composition, and practice sites, while recognizing that our current educational systems might not yet adequately prepare us to do so. More widespread adoption of interprofessional education (IPE) across the educational life span may serve as one mechanism to enhance interprofessional competencies, though IPE is not without its challenges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).