Health professions educators face challenges in providing learners with authentic experiences that build competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice (IPP). The MGH Institute of Health Professions (IHP) has created a comprehensive approach, branded IMPACT Practice®, which provides an overarching framework for interprofessional education (IPE), competency development and assessment across settings. 

IMPACT Practice® focuses on entry-level graduate students in health sciences and uses integrated cases, community service, team simulations, and clinical practice contexts to support achievement of institutional core competencies. IHP students in nursing, occupational and physical therapy, speech-language pathology and physician assistant studies interact over the course of their professional programs as they build a multidimensional capability for interprofessional team-based care delivery and leadership. The goal of IMPACT Practice® is to create an exemplary interprofessional learning environment that integrates collaborative practice across programs and settings in the context of entry-level graduate professional education.

The IMPACT Practice® initiative has developed over a six-year period, with success factors including its passionate stakeholders, perseverance in implementing change in practice and education, strategic partnerships, and organizational commitment and financial support. Building on early IPE efforts based on the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) competencies, IMPACT Practice® has grown to provide an organizational framework for prioritizing interprofessional initiatives and assuring systematic assessment of efforts focused on graduates achieving institutional core competencies in six domains – Professionalism, Patient-Centered Care, Communication, Clinical Decision-Making, Systems-Based Practice, Leadership – that integrate and exceed the IPEC competencies.

IMPACT Practice® involves required and elective interprofessional experiences including credited coursework, team-based clinical simulations, a health mentor program, acute-care clinical experiences, and collaboration with medical students in a student-run ambulatory practice. Finally, in IHP’s new IMPACT Practice® Center, students and clinical supervisors deliver pro bono services to the community in an IPP context.

While the IMPACT Practice® story is unique to the MGH Institute, we have identified generic factors essential to program building for IPE/IPP. Using the IMPACT Practice® exemplar, we will employ a timeline scenario and backward design model to outline critical questions to be addressed in preparing for, overseeing, implementing, and evaluating sustainable interprofessional programs.

Additionally, we will share resources from the literature and our own work that support this program planning process, including a five-part framework that can be adapted to other contexts in higher education and health professions training.  Workshop leaders will use tabletop scenarios and consensus building around participant-identified challenges to engage learners in building skills for environmental analysis, program development and problem solving. Our resources and templates will aid participants in applying these skills and adapting the content to new contexts as they leave with an action plan for moving their own interprofessional work forward.

Learning Objectives: using IMPACT Practice® as a model, participants in this workshop will enhance their ability to:

• Describe a developmental process for building current initiatives into integrated IPE/IPP programs.
• Perform an environmental scan to identify existing supports/challenges to realizing their interprofessional initiatives.  
• Identify strategic action items with potential to increase success in implementing sustainable IPE/IPP change in their own settings, institutions, systems.