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Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice

Decent Essays

The World Health Organization has described interprofessional education and collaborative practice in the following “Interprofessional education occurs when students from two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. Interprofessional education is a necessary step in preparing a ‘collaborative practice-ready’ health workforce that is better prepared to respond to local health needs.” 1 A question proposed is “why is interprofessional education important?” and an answer to this can be found within the WHO’s description of interprofessional education, in order to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. If interprofessional education improves health outcomes then that is a definite reason that it is important, for health care professionals one of the most important responsibilities is to improve health outcomes, which is only slightly less important than “do no harm” in my eyes. A cornerstone of interprofesssional education is communication. I am going to propose a situation where there is no communication between health care professionals. A mother brings a prescription for her 3 month old daughter to a pharmacy, the prescription reads “Amoxicillin 400mg/5ml suspension Give 10ml by mouth three times daily” the pharmacist at this point has two options: 1) fill the prescription as is and assume the Dr. is correct (even though the facility software says the dose is too high) 2)

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