Interprofessional education, the way forward

A health professional’s education is the final culmination of knowledge, educational theories, principles, and practices with application to the situation of clinical service which has patient care and safety as its priority.^[1] The ultimate goal of health professionals’ education is to produce healthcare professionals who can improve the health outcomes of society.

The health-care outcomes have a direct relationship to the graduate outcomes of the health professional’s education. The health professional’s education and health care service are two major systems that need to be carefully constructed to be effective and efficient in impacting health care. Challenges in health-care needs also affect both systems. The health professional’s education is constructed by curricular framework that is based on the domains of knowledge, skills and attitudes in the context of clinical practice and health care services. The graduate outcomes, provide them with competence to play the roles of a clinician, communicator, team player, professional and a life long learner. These may also warrant a change from teacher-centered to learner-centered approaches.

The current COVID challenges have established the need for integrating technology^[2] and raised questions about whether there is a gap between training and practice.

The health professional’s education are through programs that are time bound and having a curricular framework. The National Medical Commission recently introduced a competency-based medical education curriculum for the medical undergraduates,^[3] which is a step ahead in producing doctors to meet the real need of society. Introducing a competency-based education curriculum in health professional education (HPE) will provide greater flexibility to the learners, and learning becomes student-centric. Introducing integrated health professionals training at any point of entry-level graduate program needs to be considered. Numerous strategies have been suggested to bridge the health professionals’ education and practice gaps. Creating a favorable learning environment integrating innovative technologies such as simulation training, artificial intelligence is a great opportunity for health professionals’ education and training. Adapting digital technologies in HPE will be a paradigm shift in creating competent healthcare professionals. However, creating national policies on online and blended learning in HPE is warranted as HPE is entirely different from technical and other education systems. Integrating humanities and other streams with HPE needs meticulous planning and openness. The internalization of HPE is an opportunity to capitalize on establishing high standard collaborative programs with reputed global universities to prepare globally competent healthcare professionals.

Constructing a new model of inter-professional training and competence buiding will be a paradigm shift towards the goal of patient-centered integrated health care. In interprofessional education, learners from different healthcare professions learn collaboratively toward achieving a predetermined learning outcome specific to their chosen profession. According to the WHO Framework for Action on Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (2010), “Interprofessional education occurs when two or more professionals learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes.”^[4]

It is observed that interprofessional education helps the students of the different healthcare professions to understand roles and responsibilities in delivering health care as a team. Communication skills improve through structured interactions. Learners can collaborate with the team to understand the dynamics of healthcare delivery as a team.^[5] Health professions education institutes should consider promoting interprofessional education in India either through formal or informal training.^[6] The participation of students of various programs can be facilitated at the institutional level through the respective educational units. It is worth investing time and resources in interprofessional training at the institutional level to improve the healthcare delivery.

A way forward in promoting interprofessional education is by disseminating knowledge through a multidisciplinary journal on health sciences. Sri Ramachandra Journal of Medicine has reinvented itself in an endeavor to make the journal of the Sri Ramachandra Journal of Health Sciences comply with current global standards of scientific publishing. The editorial board has selected Scientific Scholar (scientificscholar.com) a reputed publishing house to publish the SRJHS. Scientific Scholar owns its Manuscript Management System called Editorial Assist (journalmanagement.org) which is very intuitive with a short learning curve.

The focus is on various aspects of ethics, compliance, good publishing practices, and indexing requirements. The journal is open-access published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The manuscript submission system follows a double-blind peer-review process which is highly rigorous ensuring that manuscripts are scientifically accurate and relevant and authors disclose all conflicts, affiliations, and financial associations such that the published content is not biased.

The advertising policies of the journal follow the recommendations of the World Association of Medical Editors. The Editorial Board and publisher follow the latest Core Practice Guidelines for Editors and Journal publishers as outlined by the Committee on publication ethics.

The first issue on the new platform is reflective of multidisciplinary professional education with a variety of articles that reflect highlight healthcare concerns.

A quality improvement initiative that aimed at creating awareness and learning techniques to improve the expression of breast milk led to improved outcomes among pre-term and very low birth weight babies, in our institution and is the basis of an original article. A letter to the editor suggests practical approaches that academic institutions can consider while hosting conferences to reduce their carbon footprint. Three-dimensional cell cultures are gaining ground as excellent approaches for in vitro testing that mitigates the limitations of traditional monolayer cultures of cell lines. The issue features a protocol that developed such 3D prints of 3D aggregates of a few human cancer cell lines. Mental disorders are on the rise with the most common cause being stress associated with lifestyle modifications. Supplementation of various micronutrients as food sources has been studied to improve the health outcome in these individuals in a review article. This issue also includes case reports which include a case of unusual proptosis that was successfully corrected, a subcutaneous presentation of extraskeletal osteosarcoma, an unusual subgenotype of Hepatitis B virus, and many others. The Editorial Board hopes to take the journal from strength to strength with contributions from our faculty and, that will position the SRJHS in its rightful position as an important source of professional education.