Building inter-professional cultural competence

Inter-professional education (IPE) necessitates that both educators and students need to engage in a process that requires learning and reflecting upon professional identity, both their own and those of the other professionals on the healthcare team. Despite thinking team skills are inherent, it has become apparent that health professions students need to be taught the skills of how to communicate and negotiate as part of a team to provide collaborative care. These skills demand that health care providers need to not only learn discipline-specific clinical reasoning but team-based clinical reasoning as well. The Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel has clearly identified team-based skills as a core skill to health care practice. Teamwork and team-based skills become even more critical in health care delivery for vulnerable patients and populations. Vulnerable patients present with complex health issues that benefit from a team-based approach to care. This chapter will describe the development and implementation of a pilot IPE course preparing students for health care with vulnerable patients. The authors discuss the importance of developing inter-professional cultural competence for the faculty team of educators in order to execute such complex IPE. Reflections on the challenges to developing and implementing such an innovative IPE experience will be discussed.