The New Social Worker Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2013 | Page 22

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New Acronyms=Greater Opportunities for
Social Workers in Health Care Settings
by Jennifer Anderson, MSW, LCSW, MAC

or decades, regional, national, and
international health care organizations have called for reform in
the education of health professionals
and have urged that health profession
students no longer receive instruction in
isolation. The term “health professions”
refers to any discipline that provides
patient care, such as but not limited to
pharmacists, nurses, doctors, occupational and physical therapists, dentists, and
social workers. There has been increased
focus on re-training the health care delivery system to promote interprofessional
teamwork, collaborative care, and to
improve institutional quality and safety.
The question becomes: How can health
care providers learn to collaborate effectively
in the provision of health care, when they are
educated in separation from one another?

To answer that question, specific
interprofessional collaborative practice competencies were developed for
all health professions students and for
existing health care professionals. The
passage of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Steinbrook, 2009) and
the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act of 2010 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010) have created a myriad of new
health care delivery models in hopes of
achieving better outcomes in care. These
new models require health care students
and providers to be trained in interprofessional collaborative practices to
promote safe, effective, and high quality
health care services. These new models
embrace interprofessional collaborative
practices and interprofessional education
efforts.

And so began the emergence of new
acronyms and a new field with greater
opportunities for social work students
looking to learn about, from, and within
health care settings. Social work students
and social work professionals will need to
learn these new acronyms. One is IPE, or
interprofessional education. The second
is IPCP, or interprofessional collaborative
practice.

Beginning in 2009, a panel of six
national education associations, including the American Association of Colleges
of Nursing, the American Association
of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine,

the American Association of Colleges
of Pharmacy, the American Dental
Education Association, the Association
of American Medical Colleges, and the
Association of Schools of Public Health,
met as a group to create the competencybased movement of interprofessional
education, IPE, which consists of four
primary domains and subsequent competencies (Ten Cate & Scheele, 2007).
Interprofessional education (IPE) occurs
“when students from two or more professions learn about, from, and with each
other to enable effective collaboration
and improve health outcomes” (World
Health Organization [WHO], 2010,
p. 30). The goal of IPE is to prepare
competent health care professionals by
educating all students in the knowledge,
skills, and attitudes necessary for collaborative interprofessional practice. Both
the competency domains and specific
competencies were left to be amenable,
wide-ranging, and contextualized to the
individual discipline and the clinical or
institutional setting in which they would
be applied. IPCP is linked to IPE.

These two new acronyms have
developed into a myriad of opportunities for social work students and social
work professionals. Academic institutions across the nation are seeking to
break down the educational silos and
create programs, case simulations, case
competitions, clinical or field practicum
experiences, and experiential learning
initiatives both in and outside of the
classroom for multiple disciplines to
partner in learning “about” health care
delivery, “from” all potential providers
that provide primary to ancillary patient
care, and to do so “within” a style of collaboration and shared decision-making
reflective of patient-centered theory.

The common feature across all IPE
programs, models, and/or initiatives is
that there is an “integrated application
of knowledge where the student can
adapt to change, develop new behaviors,
and continue to improve performance”
(Walsh, Gordon, Marshall, Wilson, &
Hunt, 2005, p 232). Given the fact that
all health profession students perform
an internship, clinical rotation, and/or
field practicum, IPE creates a wonder-

20

Winter 2013

The New Social Worker

ful opportunity for social work students
to learn IPCP as they enter into their
field education programming. Ensuring
that health care settings that serve as
field sites are ready to create an IPEand IPCP-rich learning environment is
another opportunity for the field of social
work.

Research on IPE and IPCP certainly
supports this, as social work is one of
the most frequently invited disciplines
in IPE initiatives, and as such, social
work students learn and practice collaboratively with other disciplines, such
as nursing, pharmacy, medicine, occupational therapy, physical therapy,
public health, dentistry, and lab sciences
(Graybeal, Long, Scalise-Smith, & Zeibig,
2011). It is interesting to note that not all
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