Creating the Health Care Team of the Future: The Toronto Model for Interprofessional Education and Practice

One way to significantly improve the delivery of health care is to teach the health professionals who provide care to work together, to communicate with each other across professional boundaries, and to start to think and act like a team that has the patient at its center. The team-based care movement is at the heart of major changes in medical education and will become an element in the new accreditation standards.

Through its Centre for Interprofessional Education, the pioneering approach in this area taken by the University of Toronto has attracted international attention. The role of the Centre for IPE, a formal partnership between the University of Toronto and the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network, is to create a hub for the university and the many teaching hospitals where all core parties can be actively engaged in redesigning this new model of health care. In Creating the Health Care Team of the Future, Sioban Nelson, Maria Tassone, and Brian D. Hodges give a brief background of the Toronto Model and provide a step-by-step guide to developing an IPE program.

Sioban Nelson is the Vice-Provost Academic Programs, University of Toronto. She is coeditor of Complexities of Care: Nursing Reconsidered and Notes on Nightingale: The Influence and Legacy of a Nursing Icon, both from Cornell, and the author of Say Little Do Much: Nursing, Nuns and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century. Maria Tassone is the inaugural director of the Centre for IPE. She is also the Senior Director, Interprofessional Education and Practice at the University Health Network in Toronto, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. Brian D. Hodges is Vice-President Education at the University Health Network and Professor of Psychiatry, Scientist at the Wilson Centre for Research in Education, and Richard and Elizabeth Currie Chair in Health Professions Education Research at the University of Toronto. He is coeditor of The Question of Competence: Reconsidering Medical Education in the Twenty-first Century and author of The Objective Structured Clinical Examination: A Socio-History.