Sustaining undergraduate inter-professional practice

Introduction/background: At the UTAS we have developed several interprofessional practice (IPP) opportunities for our undergraduate health care practitioner (HCP) students involving the delivery of authentic patient care. Our Residential Aged Care Facility (RACF) IPP placement has been sustained over 7 years and offers medical, pharmacy and nursing students a successful IPP opportunity where all students engage in resident reviews. We also designed an IPP activity involving a larger number of disciplines dealing with the management of chronic pain. The initial workshop for this was rated very favourable by all participating students and the patients rated highly the multi-week program that was led by exercise physiology (EP). However, non-EP student engagement after the initial workshop was poor in this longitudinal IPP opportunity. We are still trying to determine if this was because the patient clinical setting is skewed to one discipline’s role, or if the longitudinal nature interfered too much with other student commitments.

Purpose/objectives: We would like to share with you how we managed to form a successful IPP placement in a clinical environment in residential aged care but were less successful in our chronic pain clinics.

Issues/ questions for exploration or ideas for discussion: How successful have your IPP activities been and how have you managed to sustain them? How do you ensure engagement by all HCP students in IPP? Can a longitudinal version of IPP work? What have we all learnt about the making of a successful IPP activity for undergraduate HCP students?