New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

Earlier in February I had the opportunity to make a submission to a ministerial taskforce on the development of the workforce in New Zealand's Primary Health Care Sector. I took up this opportunity for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to raise the profile of rehabilitation within the health sector. I believe rehabilitation can and does occur in Primary Health, and that rehabilitation principles have a place to play in the management of chronic health conditions as well as acute injuries.

Secondly, and more pertinently in this case, I wanted to raise the profile of interprofessional education (IPE) for health professionals. I was supported in this latter endeavour by my colleagues, Eileen McKinley (a nurse) and Dr Sue Pollen (a GP), both of who are Senior Lecturers in Primary Care at University of Otago, Wellington. In our submission we highlighted the fact that there are no incentives in place to encourage the development and uptake of IPE. There is no central body in NZ within the Ministry of Health or outside of it to champion IPE or to promote strategies to implement it. In this regard NZ is behind other counties such as Canada, the Great Britain and Australia, all of whom have developed such initiatives.

The UK is perhaps one of the forerunners of IPE, setting up the "Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education" (CAIPE) in 1987. CAIPE is an independent charity organisation, which started with a focus solely on Primary Care, but which has expanded over the years to include individual and organisational members in local government, higher education, professional associations, as well as members from the voluntary and private sector. The objective of CAIPE has been to promote and develop IPE as a way of improving collaboration between practitioners and organisations. The CAIPE website is a now significant resource for information on research and best practice into IPE. More recently, in Canada, the "Enchancing Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Primary Health Care (EICP) Initiative" was established in 2004, and in Australia, the "Australasian Interprofessional Practice and Education Network" (AIPPEN) has sprung up. We argued in our submission to the ministerial taskforce that NZ needs a similar body to support the development of IPE in our country. We suggested that it was unrealistic to expect single-disciplinary organisations (such as the various boards, societies and councils for professional groups) to advocate effectively for IPE when their primary responsibility was to their own area of professional work.

So what is IPE and how does it differ from traditional approaches to clinical education? Well, IPE is more than just people from different disciplines listening to the same lecture and more than simply inviting a guest speaker from an alternative discipline to present to a single-disciplinary group of students. CAIPE defines IPE as occurring "when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care". In the health sector we talk about the need to develop teamwork and to break down the ‘silo' mentality between professional groups, but in traditional single-disciplinary approaches to professional training, we appear to assume such teamwork can be learned from a book. If NZ is serious about improving collaborative practices between professional groups and maximising opportunities for interprofessional teamwork, we need to be initiating strategies to enhancing the update and development of IPE.