IPCE is whenever “members from two or more professions learn with, from, and about each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes,” as Kate Regnier (ACCME) pointed out at the Cologne Consensus Conference 2017, which was held on Sept. 14/15, 2017 in Cologne, Germany.
While inter-professional collaboration occurs in health-care systems whenever patient outcome is dependent on a team based approach, “IPCE is not intuitive” (Jamie deMaria, Medscape). Barriers for implementation of IPCE include: Resistance to change, lack of leadership (administrative and faculty), crowded curricula, cost factors, few incentives, reimbursement models, separation of professional programs within a campus and across universities, credentialing and accountability at the “individual” level and, lack of accreditation expectations (Regnier).
At the CCC 2017 providers have presented a variety of best practice projects to serve educational needs of teams.
IPCE may represent challenges to accreditors, since different accreditation bodies might be involved, or it maybe difficult to sort out how to achieve accreditation, if a group of health professionals has no accreditation body and/or accreditors do not cooperate in case the same content is going to be presented on multiple occasions in different countries. Since many years EBAC has promoted inter-professional education and practice, and offers accreditation in cooperation with European national as well as international accreditors.
The CCC 2018 will take place on Sept. 13/14, 2018, in Ottawa (hosted by the Royal College) and will discuss “What CPD accreditation data tells us: about activities, providers, learners”.
Also at CCC 2017 EBAC and the Canadian Royal College exchanged certificates of recognition of substantial equivalency of accreditation systems.
Thus, EBAC is the first and only European accreditor to hold an agreement on substantial equivalency with the Royal College and the US Accreditation Council for CME (ACCME).