NUR 654 Module 4 Interprofessional Paper Example

Adding Interprofessional Education to an Online RN to BSN Program: Competencies, Evidence and Design

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

NUR 654: Curriculum Foundations in Nursing Education

Module Four Interprofessional Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Adding Interprofessional Education to an Online RN to BSN Program: Competencies, Evidence and Design

Working nurses already practice alongside physicians, pharmacists, social workers and therapists every day, so an RN to BSN program might seem to have little to add about teamwork. Yet collaboration at work often happens by habit rather than design, and communication failures between professions remain a leading contributor to harm. The 2021 AACN Essentials include interprofessional partnerships as a domain, and accreditors will look for it in the curriculum. The composite Pine Ridge College is building an online RN to BSN program and also offers online degrees in social work, public health and health administration. This paper plans how interprofessional education can be built into the nursing program in partnership with those programs. It argues that interprofessional education should be designed around shared competencies, delivered through experiences in which students genuinely learn with each other and presented with honest claims about what the evidence shows.

What Interprofessional Education Is

The World Health Organization (2010) defined interprofessional education as occurring when students from two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. The definition excludes a common substitute: students from different programs sitting in the same lecture without interacting. Learning together requires shared tasks in which each profession's knowledge is needed and students must negotiate roles and decisions. The WHO framework also argued that interprofessional education prepares a collaborative practice-ready workforce and that health systems benefit when professionals learn to collaborate before and during practice.

Competencies to Guide Outcomes

The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (2016) organized core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice into four domains: values and ethics for interprofessional practice, roles and responsibilities, interprofessional communication and teams and teamwork. Each domain includes specific sub-competencies, such as communicating one's role clearly to patients and other professionals and applying relationship-building values and team principles to plan and deliver care. The collaborative's sponsoring organizations span many health professions, which makes the competencies a shared language that nursing, social work, public health and health administration faculty can all use. Pine Ridge will write one program outcome for each domain, shared across all four programs, so that students from each profession are working toward the same competencies in joint activities.

What the Evidence Shows

Enthusiasm for interprofessional education has outpaced the evidence. Reeves et al. (2013) conducted a Cochrane review of studies that evaluated interprofessional education interventions against control groups and measured effects on professional practice or health care outcomes. They found fifteen studies. Some reported positive outcomes, such as improved working culture and patient satisfaction in emergency departments, improved collaborative team behavior and reduced clinical error rates, and better management of care in several settings, while others found mixed or no effects. Because the studies were few, varied and often small, the reviewers concluded that the evidence did not allow generalizable conclusions about the effectiveness of interprofessional education. For Pine Ridge, the implication is to design carefully, measure outcomes and avoid promising partners that the program will reduce errors or improve patient outcomes on its own.

Three Online Experiences

First, a shared case module in the program's second term: small teams of four, one student from each program, work through an unfolding case of an older man with heart failure, depression and housing insecurity over three weeks. Each stage requires knowledge from more than one profession, such as a social worker's assessment of benefits eligibility or a health administration student's understanding of post-acute payment rules, and teams post a joint care plan with a brief statement of each member's contribution.

Second, a synchronous virtual team meeting in the leadership course: students role-play a discharge planning conference by video, with a faculty member playing the patient's daughter, and must reach a plan the family accepts. A structured debriefing addresses communication and role clarity.

Third, a workplace project in the capstone: each nursing student interviews two colleagues from other professions at their own workplace about a shared problem, such as delays in discharge, and proposes an improvement developed with them. Because RN to BSN students work in health care, this project brings interprofessional learning into real practice.

Assessment and Faculty Agreements

Assessment will use a shared rubric aligned with the four IPEC domains, scored by faculty from at least two programs for each team product, and a brief self-assessment of collaborative competence at the start and end of the program. Peer evaluation within teams will inform individual grades. Joint activities require agreements that are easy to overlook: aligned academic calendars for the shared weeks, a common learning platform, workload credit for faculty from each program and a shared policy for team conflicts. The four program directors will sign a memorandum covering these points before the first shared module runs.

Using What Working Nurses Bring

RN to BSN students differ from prelicensure students in an important way: they have already worked on interprofessional teams, sometimes for decades, and they bring both skill and frustration. Their experience can enrich the shared modules, since a nurse who has sat through hundreds of discharge conferences knows where plans fall apart. It can also bring entrenched assumptions about other professions, such as the belief that social workers only arrange placements or that administrators care only about cost. The shared case is designed to challenge those assumptions by placing each profession's knowledge where it is genuinely needed. Early in the module, each team member will describe what their profession contributes and what they wish other professions understood about their work, which gives students from other programs a chance to correct misconceptions directly.

Social work, public health and health administration students, most of whom also work, bring perspectives nursing students rarely hear, such as how payment rules shape discharge options or how a county health department sets priorities. Faculty will prepare discussion prompts that draw these perspectives out rather than letting the most experienced clinicians dominate, and team roles such as facilitator and recorder will rotate.

Conclusion

Interprofessional education belongs in Pine Ridge's RN to BSN program because the Essentials require it and because collaboration improves when it is learned deliberately. Grounding outcomes in the IPEC domains, designing experiences in which students truly learn with each other and assessing them jointly gives the program a sound approach. The Cochrane evidence counsels humility: the program should measure what its experiences achieve and claim only what its data support.

References

Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2016). Core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: 2016 update. Interprofessional Education Collaborative.

Reeves, S., Perrier, L., Goldman, J., Freeth, D., & Zwarenstein, M. (2013). Interprofessional education: Effects on professional practice and healthcare outcomes (update). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (3), Article CD002213. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD002213.pub3

World Health Organization. (2010). Framework for action on interprofessional education and collaborative practice. World Health Organization.