The Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia (IRPbc)

Abstract

The Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia IRPbc was established in 2003 as an important first step for the Province of British Columbia, Canada, in creating a collaborative interprofessional education initiative that engages numerous communities, health authorities and post-secondary institutions in working toward a common goal. Designed to foster interprofessional education and promote rural recruitment of health professionals, the program places teams of students from a number of health professional programs into rural and remote British Columbia communities. In addition to meeting their discipline specific learning objectives, the student teams are provided with the opportunity to experience the challenges of rural life and practice and advance their interprofessional competence. To date, 62 students have participated in the program from nursing, social work, medicine, physical therapy, occupational therapy, pharmaceutical sciences, speech language pathology, audiology, laboratory technology, and counseling psychology. While not without numerous struggles and challenges, IRPbc has been successful in meeting the program mandate. It has also had a number of positive outcomes not anticipated at the time the program was established.

Implementing and Sustaining a Rural Interprofessional Clinical Education Program

“…Reports from successful organizations could have been used to influence administrators, and funding to support implementation over several terms might have led to greater uptake. Timing of funding availability has been reported as important for other programs where potential participants were excluded because of their inability to mobilize in time [9].…”

“…Scheduling has also been identified as an important issue in IPE, particularly when students are being assigned to rural locations [9]. Most often curriculum developers for different health science programs do not plan clinical placement requirements and sequencing to support IPE.…”

“…While there are a number of common sustainability factors like commitment of staff and leadership, meaningful participation, and adequate resources, little has been written about the conditions for longer-term sustainability of IPE projects. Pilot projects and curriculum initiatives, including use of simulation, have been described [9,12,13,15,[17][18][19]21], but these tend to be preliminary reports of successful initiatives.…”

“…Rural IPE has been identified as having three advantages: 1) demonstration of IPC is more likely in the rural environment because there are limited numbers of health professionals in rural settings and there may be more breadth of experiences for students [18,22]; 2) recruitment of future practitioners to rural settings may be improved through IPE projects [18]; and 3) new clinical placement opportunities can be created for healthcare programs that seek to increase enrolment [22]. While there are programs in which students are sent to rural locations to practice [9,18], other programs base their rural teaching in the educational setting, using case studies and simulations, with only short trips to rural environments [17,21]. Situations where students not only practice together but live together in rural areas can improve understanding among members of healthcare programs, though there may also be tensions created [18,22].…”

See It – Do It – Learn It: Learning Interprofessional Collaboration in the Clinical Context

“…The IRPbc (Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia) -a Canadian IPE program -engages pre-licensure learners in clinical placements in rural settings, emphasizing interprofessional learning through weekly projects, meetings, and shadowing [14,15]. The IRPbc study [14,15] reported positive results, but these findings were based solely on qualitative methods.…”