Interdisciplinary Care teams play a vital role in improving patient care and quality outcomes, as well as ensuring continuity of care.

In practice, teams deliver care. Interprofessional education trains the team, rather than the individual. Representatives from all professions on the team come together to plan and deliver medical education. Interprofessional education promotes collaboration and respect and provides the opportunity for team members to learn from each other. Training teams to work together helps reduce handoff errors.

Partners CPD strongly supports interprofessional education. We are applying to become a provider of joint accreditation through the ACCME. Joint Accreditation will allow us to approve continuing education credits for multiple professions from one application. Course planners will no longer have to submit separate applications for physician, pharmacist, nurse, social work and psychologist credits. Instead, there will be one application, one set of standards, and one fee.

Our goal is to make it easier for course planners to provide interprofessional education. A barrier to providing team-based education is the administrative burden and expense of submitting multiple applications to multiple accrediting bodies. Joint Accreditation will simplify the application process for course planners looking to provide interprofessional education.

We will provide updates on our joint accreditation status as our application progresses. In the meantime, we encourage course planners to include team members with different professions on their planning committees and in their target audiences.