By Tecia Salamu
June 8, 22, 2022:
UNC Project hosted a grand round on the topic: “Interprofessional Education” (IPE). According to the World Health Organization IPE is when students from two or more professions learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health. During the discussion, Meg Zomorodi and Mitch Kimber shared their experience with IPE and its impact on health care.
Mitch Kimber is a current student at UNC School of Nursing pursuing his Masters in Public Health.
Mitch pointed up about his IPE literature search, beginning in the 1960’s-70’s but drastically increasing since the 1990s. He said for instance, US has a lot of the results but in contrast, using a general search term of Africa yields only 307 results and in Malawi there were only 17 winter term results. Among other IPE initiatives in Africa, Mitch highlighted the rise of these IP in Africa.
“One of their major successes of IPE is a stripe HIV program, which is in conjunction with Africa African forum for research and education and health, and this is an intern professional group of nine medical or nursing schools in sub Saharan Africa, which I’ve developed a curriculum,” he said.
He also accentuated the impact of IPE throughout his experience: “in my practice, especially as an ICU nurse, there’s constant collaboration so inner professional education starting early and going through practice has been very important to me” he said.
Zomorodi who is a professor at UNC School of Nursing also gave her presentation why IPE is important. While speaking on the disadvantage of lack of IPE in health care, she emphasized that it can lead to issues with miscommunication and ultimately healthcare error that will resolve. “In America healthcare error is the third leading cause of death. When we attribute that to why 70% of those deaths come down to miscommunication and, if you think about the last time that you’ve ever had a disagreement in your job or with a loved one, if you look at the root cause of that chances are it was due to a miscommunication air,” she pointed out.
In order to put a stop to such healthcare error, a national and international group came together in 2010 to talk about what professional education should and could look like. From that they came into professional teamwork
and practice how they can work together to achieve improved health outcomes into professional communication that again ties back to 70% of those healthcare errors due to miscommunication.
Interprofessional education teaches how to collaborate and practice team based care. And it all begins now. IPE needs to start early in curriculum and encouraging colleagues to get involved.