Interprofessional education and practice guide: interprofessional team writing to promote dissemination of interprofessional education scholarship and products

ABSTRACT

Collaborations to develop, implement, evaluate, replicate, and write about interprofessional education (IPE) activities within and across institutions are wonderful opportunities to experience teamwork, team communication, ethics and values, and the roles and responsibilities of interprofessional team writing. Just as effective communication in interprofessional team-based care is essential for providing safe, high-quality health care, similar communication strategies are necessary to produce high-quality scholarship of IPE curricula and activities. Relationship and communication issues that affect health care teams’ abilities to work together effectively (e.g., hierarchy, exclusion, assumptions, non-responsiveness, biases, stereotypes and poor hand-offs of information) can also occur in interprofessional team writing. Between 1970 and 2010, interprofessional practice research publications increased by 2293%. Although there has been tremendous growth in the IPE literature, especially of articles that require collaborative writing, there have not been any papers addressing the challenges of interprofessional team writing. As more teams collaborate to develop IPE, there is a need to establish principles and strategies for effective interprofessional team writing. In this education and practice guide, a cross-institutional team of faculty, staff, and graduate students who have collaborated on externally funded IPE grants, conferences, products, and workshops will share lessons learned for successfully collaborating in interprofessional team writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Interprofessional collaboration
• interprofessional research
• teamwork
• interdisciplinary
• faculty development
• dissemination

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the patients, families, students, staff, and faculty with whom we have had the honor to work and collaborate on IPE over the years including Dr. Brian Ross for his work on IPE. We would also like to thank our colleague, Laurel Barchet, BS, RN for her work on our online Interprofessional Team Writing Toolkit.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the writing and content of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported in part by a generous grant from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation under Award Number B15-02. This project was also supported in part by the National Center For Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number TL1 TR002318. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.