Cross-Institutional Collaboration: An Emerging Model for IPE Facilitator Development

Interprofessional Education (IPE) facilitators are critical to the development of positive and collaborative learning experiences for students from different disciplines. These health professions educators require a broad range of interprofessional knowledge and skills for effective implementation, which usually necessitates a significant adjustment from uniprofessional content delivery. However, faculty development for IPE is often infrequent or lacks stadardization. Further, faculty efforts related to IPE often go unrecognized as they are rarely part of the evaluation, promotion, and tenure process.

As one strategy to address these deficiencies, leadership from the Texas IPE Consortium developed and implemented an online facilitator certification program for IPE practitioners across the state. This offering, which provided asynchronous and synchronous individual, small group, and large group activities, is different than other IPE facilitator training in several ways. First, the effort is the result of robust cross-institutional collaboration, involving five institutions and professions in the design and implementation of the training. Second, delivery targeted an IPE Community of Practice and included 66 participants and 18 facilitators from over 20 disciplines and 31 institutions. Even with a modest registration fee, this resulted in substantial cost-savings. Third, the topics covered were both relevant and innovative and included establishing psychological safety; team learning; IPE facilitation techniques and challenges; promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion through IPE; and learner assessment. Application of lessons learned was conducted through the use of improv techniques, which, to our knowledge, is unprecedented. Additionally, the training was interspersed with TeamSTEPPS tools and online tools to create an engaging, experiential course. Participants received a certificate of completion to demonstrate mastery of these foundational skills to their institutions.

A retrospective pre-post survey was employed to assess participants’ self-reported changes before and after the training. An adapted version of the Interprofessional Facilitation Scale was used to measure level of self-confidence in various aspects of IPE facilitation. Initial analyses demonstrate marked improvements for participants across all domains of measured confidence. Next steps include significance testing, incorporation of quality improvement measures, and annual offerings of the training.

This seminar will focus on cross-institutional collaboration for IPE facilitator training, including the identification of innovations to level-up faculty development in this area. The seminar is aligned with the Nexus 2022 theme of Interprofessional Learning for Collaborative Practice and Education by highlighting innovations for preparing health professions educators to facilitate an interprofessional education of excellence. It is further aligned with the theme of Interprofessional Collaboration to Address Health Equity, Racism and Bias in that the content of the featured program addresses the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion through IPE. Learning strategies such as individual reflection, small and large group discussions, and brainstorming will be used to ensure participants are actively engaged. Actionable skills will include asset mapping for IPE facilitator development in participants’ home regions.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to:
describe the benefits of cross-institutional collaboration for IPE faculty development;
discuss ways to leverage resources across institutions; and
identify untapped resources and map assets for IPE facilitator development in their own regions.