Continuing professional development for interprofessional teams supporting patients in healthcare decision making

Abstract

Healthcare professionals and organizations, policy makers, and the public are calling for safe and effective care that is centered on patients' needs, values, and preferences. The goals of interprofessional shared decision making and decision support are to help patients and professionals agree on choices that are effective, health promoting, realistic, and consonant with patients' and professionals' values and preferences. This requires collaboration among professionals and with patients and their family caregivers. Continuing professional development is urgently needed to help healthcare professionals acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to create and sustain a culture of collaboration. We describe a model that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate continuing education curricula in interprofessional shared decision making and decision support. This model aligns curricular goals, objectives, educational strategies, and evaluation instruments and strategies with desired learning and organizational outcomes. Educational leaders and researchers can institutionalize such curricula by linking them with quality improvement and patient safety initiatives.

Learnings and challenges to deploy an interprofessional and independent medical education programme to a new audience

“…Blended learning has also consistently shown effectiveness in knowledge acquisition compared with no intervention at all [26,27]. It has demonstrated improvements in learning outcomes in graduate studies where curricula are based on adult learning theory [8,9,28,29]. However, no evidence, as yet, has demonstrated the extent to which deep learning can result from a short-term learning scenario, such as CPD activities where adult learning principles apply.…”

“…And while many universities include IPE and interprofessional learning in their health and social care programmes, the content is general in nature; learning outcomes, including benefits to patients, are not formally assessed [4,6]. In countries such as the US and Canada where learning outcomes are routinely assessed, interprofessional CPDs have been shown to improve the participants’ understanding of the roles of different professions, resulting in improved respect and collaboration [7,8]. In 2016, Dunston et al [9] submitted a report to the Australian government recommending embedding IPE into accreditation and CPD requirements for professional registration.…”

Incorporating a Continuing Professional Development Process into Residency Training

“…19 Additional barriers recognized in the United States include the division of inter-professional decision making and lack of available time. 16,20 While there is literature to support the use of the CPD process for health care professionals who have completed training, there is little data concerning use of CPD by pharmacy residents. They are an ideal group to receive CPD training as they can utilize the CPD cycle to develop a specific plan, based on individual goal-setting, and meet goals and outcomes established by the American Society of HealthSystem Pharmacists (ASHP).…”

Inter-professional shared decision making – increasing the “shared” in shared decision making

“…[9][10][11][12][13][14] Makoul and Clayman [15] identify 8 steps in an SDM protocol: identifying and explaining the decision to be made, discussing the risks and benefits of each option, eliciting patient values and preferences, discussing patient's ability and self-efficacy, presenting recommendations, checking and clarifying patient understanding, making or explicitly deferring decision, arranging follow up. In a traditional SDM context, these steps are preformed by the physician, typically within a single visit but can be distributed across visits.…”