Developing academic/Interprofessional partnerships: Creating opportunities for interdisciplinary team training for nursing undergraduate students in rural Oregon

Statement of the problem: The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has identified the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams as one of five core competencies for health care professionals to function effectively as clinicians within the 21st century health care system (Greiner & Knebel, 2003).  Developing sustainable models of interprofessional education (IPE) that can work in various settings is imperative as the most common barrier is lack of available partners (Abu-Rish et al., 2012). At Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU) IPE training events and a course were created and piloted on the OHSU Portland campus. A key impediment to expanding the availability of the course is finding a way to meet the interprofessional experience for students whose programs are not located on the Portland campus. Approach: The goal of this project is to develop viable interprofessional/academic partnerships to address the recruitment of interprofessional students and faculty to become committed full partners in IPE education in rural Oregon. As part of the first stage of this process, we will interview community and OHSU experts that are knowledgeable about creating interdisciplinary collaborations in rural practice areas. Product/outcome: Partnerships will be formalized with setting up contracts and negotiating with other health care profession programs about the participation of their students by summer 2015. Implications: Lessons learned from interdisciplinary collaborator stakeholder interviews, the identification of partners, and the process used to formalize these partnerships can be used as a blueprint for developing these critical interprofessional opportunities for other nursing programs located in rural areas.