Building a successful platform for interprofessional education for health professions in an Asian university.

Implementing Interprofessional Education (IPE) across health professions schools is challenging. Within an Asian context, academic staff at the National University of Singapore designed a platform to create a sustainable IPE effort. A two-pronged approach was developed to ensure adequate coverage of key concepts relating to IPE within each involved faculty. The Interprofessional Core Curricula (ICC) component ensures that each health profession student will be exposed to IPE concepts in their required curriculum. Interprofessional Enrichment Activities (IEA) incentivize further cross-faculty participation and progress within the IPE competency framework. Best practices and success factors were identified, while lessons learned led to further improvements. Adoption of this approach can help circumvent well-known barriers to implementation.

How we put into practice the principles of embedding medical students into healthcare teams.

To learn the practice of medicine, one must practice medicine. To maximize opportunities for practice, medical students are often embedded into functioning healthcare teams. At the National University of Singapore, students are distributed for clinical training at a variety of sites across the country. To enhance consistency of experience, the principles of embedding were clarified by a consensus-driven process and implemented according to local context. The principles are that embedding is safe for students and patients, independent thought, and commitment are required, students add value to the team, and that timely meaningful feedback is given. During the implementation phase, many lessons were distilled to further improve the process of student embedding.