Building interprofessional cultural competence: Reflections of faculty engaged in training students to care for the vulnerable

IntroductionScholars, educators and health care organizations all agree: interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative health care practice are essential to provide quality, holistic care for patients across health care settings (1). Health care providers today are faced with challenges including complex diagnoses and limited resources along with providing care in a diverse team environment to maximize care. The importance of team care becomes more evident when working with patients who are vulnerable. Collaborative care and team-based practice are now being recognized as skills that need to be taught and enhanced (1). Health care team interactions that are negative or ineffective can profoundly impact patient outcomes and the overall success of a health care organization (2). Team development, both for the individual health care practitioner and the health care team, is also critical to the success of collaborative care (2). Interprofessional education (IPE) has emerged as a pedagogical approach to train health care students to be prepared for health care practice. Within the context of IPE, a variety of pedagogies have been shown to teach collaborative, team skills. The overall intent of IPE is to move students beyond thinking within oneu0027s own health care discipline and to expand clinical reasoning to a team-based approach (3).Accreditation bodies have now included interprofessional practice as a core skill for many health care professions (4, 5). Students from across the health sciences will now be learning skills including collaborative ethical decision making, how to engage in successful team interactions, appropriate team communication and team problem solving (1). Pecukonis, Doyle, and Bliss (6) propose that the best way to prepare students to build the skills necessary for collaborative care in practice is to develop interprofessional cultural competence. Despite an effort in IPE to build team-based care skills, health care education is largely profession-centric which leads to the development of ethnocentrism held by professionals creating barriers to collaborative health care practice (6).According to Pecukonis et al (6), even the social construction of the term professionalism does not promote collaboration but instead leads to competition among health care providers. Due to the social construct of being part of a profession, collaborative care faces challenges and requires health professions educators to alter their thinking to develop and implement appropriate IPE. In order to break down existing social constructs to promote increased collaborative care, Pecukonis et al proposed that educators follow the concept of IDEA: Interaction, Data, Expertise and Attention (6). The authors of this manuscript will use the mnemonic of IDEA to describe the development of an IPE course focused on preparing students, both as individuals and as part of a team, to provide care to vulnerable populations and/or individuals. The premise of IDEA provides a foundation for building interprofessional cultural competence not just among students but professionals and educators as well. Experts in interprofessional education have long argued the importance of faculty development for successful IPE (7).Any team of educators implementing IPE need to develop their own interprofessional cultural competence in order to be effective in designing and implementing successful IPE for students.This manuscript will describe the journey of a team of educators in developing interprofessional cultural competence while facing the challenges of developing an IPE course focused on vulnerable populations.Intersecting interprofessional education and vulnerabilitySimulation centers, service-learning, case analysis, and patient safety have all been exemplars in teaching health professions students the skills necessary to engage in collaborative health care practice (3, 4, 10). However, as identified by Dow et al (9), one area of interprofessional education still in need of development is the preparation of the interprofessional team for working with vulnerable and/or underserved populations. …