Interprofessional Education and Collaboration (IPE/C)

Our future health professionals need to function in a changing healthcare environment. We consider it as necessary to prepare them to handle the challenges they encounter adequately. One solution is interprofessional education and collaboration. Healthcare professionals need to be able to collaborate interprofessionally to provide optimal care to patients and families. The patient and his or her need for help and support should be central in the caring process and not professionals. This is the reason why the Faculty of Health at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with the research centre Autonomy and participation of chronically ill people together take on the challenge to educate students interprofessionally. The following bachelor programmes participate in IPE/C: occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech and language therapy, arts therapy, nursing, midwifery and biomedical sciences. Also, we seek collaboration with other faculties, such as Social Work. Next to their profession-specific competencies we train our students in interprofessional competencies. IPE/C is directed that students from different educational programmes learning about, from and with each other. The World Health Organisations (2010) defines IPE/C as: ‘Interprofessional education occurs when two or more professionals learn about, from, and with each other to enable collaboration and improve health outcomes.’