Introduction
Dalhousie IPE Context
This resource was created to support instructors who may be venturing into interprofessional educational (IPE) for the first time and who may or may not have experience with design, delivery, and/or evaluation. It is also for seasoned IPE instructors who wish to reflect upon an existing design with interest in refreshing or redesigning to improve learners’ experiences.
Dalhousie University has a lengthy and rich history of collaboration with respect to interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice (IPECP) across the three health related faculties of Dentistry, Health, and Medicine. With over 20 health professions represented, the constellation of programs is unique in the Canadian post-secondary educational context and offers great advantages to designing and delivering IPE across the continuum of care. However, with the large number of programs, varied accreditation standards, and distributed campuses, it also creates challenges for ensuring supports are in place for faculty development and design guidance to ensure educational ‘innovations’ meet best practice standards for IPE and program accreditation.
Accreditation of education programs is one way of assuring attention is paid during the pre-licensure professional programs to interprofessional education leading to collaborative person-centred care. In 2008 Health Canada funded Phase one of an initiative that brought together eight accreditation organizations for six professions: medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and social work. This first phase of the Accreditation of Interprofessional Health Education [NewTab] (AIPHE) initiative developed guiding principles to inform the development of standards, criteria and evaluation/assessment methods as they relate to accreditation of interprofessional education in each profession that is part of AIPHE. This generated a second document, Principles and practices for integrating interprofessional education into the accreditation standards for six health professions in Canada, which can be found here [NewTab].
This foundational work and its resulting impact on curricular content and institutional processes has resulted in the incorporation of IPECP language into the accreditation standards [NewTab] for the vast majority of health and social care programs in Canada.
The requirements for developing interprofessional educational events, together with the range of health-related professional training programs, offers an excellent opportunity for developing IPECP experiences. However, in order to successfully design, deliver, and evaluate IPE, resources are needed to develop the required competencies for both the entry to practice discipline-specific expectations as well as collaborative practice competencies. Sustaining engagement in successful IPE initiatives involves focused attention on the: Learner, Faculty, and Organizational factors (Reeves et al., 2016).
From an organizational perspective, Dalhousie University has been committed to developing IPE, and has structured itself differently than other institutions with similar constellations of professional programs. For example, other Canadian universities with similar breadth of programs have (or had) central IPE offices with dedicated personnel to assist, train, track, and support the development of IPE across programs (e.g., University of Alberta University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, and University of Toronto; HSERC, n.d.). Jefferson University in the USA (JCIPE, n.d), which collaborated in the past with the Dalhousie Health Mentor’s IPE (no longer running) is also a longstanding program with a central IPE office. Readers are directed other open educational resources developed by institutions such as the Virtual Interprofessional Educator Resources at the University of Alberta (VIPER [NewTab]).
With no dedicated centralized IPE office at Dalhousie, each health-related faculty has a designated interprofessional coordinator (less than part-time) and each program within the respective faculty has assigned interprofessional coordinators. Development of interprofessional activities occurs mostly at a grass roots level with collaboration across program and/or faculty to develop IPE events for their respective programs to meet the mandatory IPE requirements. Tri-faculty events open to all students include the mandatory foundational first year event, optional mini courses and health care team challenges.
The four key organizational features which have provided the foundation for IPECP programming at Dalhousie include:
- Mandatory Foundational First Year IPE event
- IPE Requirements for Graduation
- Protected Common Time
- Dedicated Pre-booked Space (in the protected time)
The mandatory foundational first year IPE event has been in place at Dalhousie since the 1990’s with several different programming iterations over the years. The event brings together over 1100 first year learners from more than 20 different health-related programs and more than 100 facilitators. The overarching goal of the event is to introduce learners to foundations of interprofessional practice competencies and work in a collaborative team. All students from the three health-related faculties in direct entry to practice programs are enrolled in the event. Please refer to Figure 1 for the learners, locations, and respective health Faculties and associated programs at Dalhousie.
Figure 1A: Interactive Map of Faculties of Dentistry, Health and Medicine at Dalhousie University.
Figure 1B: Interactive Map of Distance Campuses from the Faculties of Health and Medicine at Dalhousie University
The Faculties of Dentistry, Health and Medicine have designated IPE requirements within their respective programs as part of their degree or diploma requirements for graduation. In the Faculty of Health all non-research students enroll in the mandatory IPE course for the duration of their degree program (IPHE 4900 for undergraduate and IPHE 5900 for graduate students). Health has the largest group of learners from 8 School stand-alone programs (Faculty of Health Programs [NewTab], n.d.). All students participate in the mandatory First–year IPE Event and the remaining qualifying IPE activities are determined by their respective School/Program/College. This may include embedded curriculum events (MacKenzie & Merritt, 2013), other naturally occurring programs with common content (e.g., Stroke IPE MacKenzie et al, 2024) and/or enrolling in an approved IPE mini course offering [NewTab]. To view a sample of the mini course application for instructors– click here [NewTab].
In 2017, the Interprofessional Education Coordinating Committee (IPECC) at Dalhousie created a table to assist in understanding the different levels of IPECP design. The Dal Learning Taxonomy [NewTab] was created to highlight the continuum of learning activities by bridging principles from revised Bloom’s taxonomy (a framework for categorizing educational goals) and Miller’s modified pyramid (a framework for assessing clinical competence) together with the levels of IPE experiences as described by the University of Alberta [NewTab].
The goal for learner participation and design should be based upon an awareness of learners’ preparation, not only to draw from their profession-specific knowledge or applied content but also their previous IPE experience and readiness for relevant practice relationships (Galway et al., 2014; Chiniara et al., 2013).
Common time for IPE across the academic timetables together with dedicated pre-booked space have been the key organizational components that have enabled successful navigation to connect, create, and implement meaningful IPE experiences at Dalhousie University. The protected common IPE time across the Faculty of Health occurs from 4:00 – 5:30 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the fall and winter semesters. This protected time allows for the delivery of several IPE opportunities such as embedded curricula IPE, centrally organized IPE mini courses, simulation-enhanced IPE (Sim-IPE), and/or large-scale IPE events like the mandatory First Year Event or optional Healthcare Team Challenges. There are dedicated classrooms booked for IPE in the Collaborative Heath Education Center (CHEB), which is also the home of the Centre for Collaborative Clinical Learning and Research (C3LR) [NewTab] which supports simulation–based learning (both uniprofessional and interprofessional). The C3LR has been a critical resource for preparing “collaborative practice ready” health care providers through the use of sim-IPE.
Watkins (2006) draws attention to how faculty may not have the skills and competencies to deliver interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) let alone be confident in their capacity to implement EDIA within IPECP.It is the perspective of the contributors to this resource that faculty in general require training in EDIA and that EDIA should be incorporated into IPECP. In the “about this resource” section you will see the diagram of the thought process that have guided the development of this OER. Please note the gray box that envelopes the process notes “Consider how EDIA concepts impact learners, instructors, design, delivery and evaluation”. The hope is that EDIA is always front of mind in every stage of IPECP development, delivery and evaluation process. While we have tried to highlight places where EDIA plays a key role at the different stages, it is also our expectation that faculty pursue EDIA training in general so they can incorporate concepts throughout their educational practice; – EDIA isn’t a checkbox, it is a lived experience. We would expect that programs have some introductory content about social justice issues, which would include information about things like equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, systems of oppression, cultural humility, and the social determinants of health, before engaging in IPECP related to this content. This would support increased safety and awareness of the diversity of other team members and patients/clients before adding the complexity of countering interprofessional stereotypes and power hierarchies.At Dalhousie University, there are many resources to support faculty in developing culturally responsive pedagogy and universal design. We refer readers to their resources and workshops [NewTab]. From a broader perspective, there are resources that address EDIA and social justice in IPECP; we refer readers to https://interprofessionalresearch.global/idea-in-ipecp-disc [NewTab].
