Interprofessional Education; a Response to Health System Challenges

Extensive changes in the health field have compelled many organizations of health sciences education to seek for the most effective educational approaches. Meanwhile, interprofessional education as a novel and efficient approach has recieved attention internationally. We conducted this study for introducing interprofessional education with a focus on its backgrounds and formation in health sciences. This integrative review study was performed during years 2012-2013 using an integrated search in PubMed, CINHAL, Ovid, and Science Direct databases. Moreover, google search engine was also used for searching in various information sources such as validated journals and conference proceedings and reports of educational organizations and assemblies, using main key words such as interprofessional education and interprofessional learning, limiting the results from 1995 to 2013 and mainly in English. We obtained more than 2000 titles including original articles, reports, web pages, letters to editor, and books. Having titles and abstracts assessed, 120 documents that were more appropriate and directly related to the study question were selected and analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Then the text contents were retrieved and final results were categorized and managed by MAXQDA software. Two themes were obtained indicating the formation of interprofessional education in the health system. The challenges theme containing 4 categories: dynamic changes in all aspects of human society, poor quality of care services, staffing crisis, and failures of uniproffessional education. The second theme named constructive strategies containing 4 categories: improvement of interprofessional interactions, promotion of interprofessional collaborations, patient centered team care, and changing in professional socialization process of health sciences students. Interprofessional education with focus on interprofessional interactions and promotion in professional socialization process of health sciences students provides necessary competency and ability for developing interprofessional collaborations and comprehensive patient-centered team care among graduates for addressing challenges in health systems.