Abstract
The Inter-Professional Education (IPE) program at Universidad Europea (Madrid, Spain) started 4 years ago and currently involves 6 health degrees and more than 1000 students every year. We are institutional members of the British IPE society (CAIPE) and members of the editorial board of the Journal of Inter-professional Education, as well as collaborators in the IPE development in Latinoamerica and Caribbean led by the Panamerican Health Organization (PAHO/WHO).
In the School of Biomedical and Health Sciences we have developed and organized activities that aim to create a collaborative and synergic environment among students of different degrees (Medicine, Nursing, Psychology, Pharmacy, Dentistry, and Biotecnology). This plan is the higher education answer to the new necessities and challenges that our healthcare practitioners are facing in their daily practice and professional development in Spain.
As part of our ongoing IPE program we focus the attention on those situations in which this multidisciplinary approach have a major impact. We found that medication errors are good examples of such situations as they can be related with the misunderstandings, distrust or simply unawareness among different health care professionals.
In the past two years, simulated interprofessional training related to medication errors have been carried out in a high fidelity environment. Our objective is to sensitize future health care professionals about events that can cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm. The practice includes an initial simulated situation followed by debriefing for analysis and comprehension of the key points: decision making, conflict solution and responsibility.
Anonymous questionnaires, taken in order to control acceptance, learning satisfaction and suggestions, indicate a strong and enthusiast support of this IPE program. The results obtained and the acquired experience, are driving us to further develop new interprofessional activities in the near future as well as introducing IPE activities in new educational areas.
