Strategic Engagement in Experiential Interprofessional Education: Best Practices Across Diverse Contexts and Medical Centers

Interprofessional collaborative practice improves health care quality, access, affordability, and workforce retention. The Institute of Medicine, health professions education accreditors, and World Health Organization advocate for transforming health professions education so students learn together throughout their training. Despite progress, curricular change has been uneven, making engagement more challenging for some professions. Effective teams respect one another, share vision, and reflect on individual and collective performance. Developing these competencies requires intentional and sustained effort over time. Can health professions graduates collaborate effectively with each other when their preparation for doing so is inconsistent? Could this imbalance in interprofessional training across professions ultimately lead to additional team dysfunction and potentially tragic consequences? Hence, experts argue for accelerating interprofessional experiential education and better integrating it into professional degree and continuing education requirements.

Participants will use retrospective case study of two well-established university-wide IPE programs and Kolb’s experiential learning framework to dive into the intricacies of theory-driven interprofessional experiential learning, to identify characteristics that effectively engage students over time and establish a foundation for workforce development through lifelong learning. Outcomes will include synthesizing best practices and identifying factors that enable or hinder experiential IPE. Participants will leave with actionable strategies for enhancing experiential IPE at their institution. This workshop will serve as a basis to design, evaluate, and improve future experiential interprofessional learning and scholarship across professions.