The intersection of professionalism and interprofessional care: development and initial testing of the interprofessional professionalism assessment (IPA).

Valid assessment of interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) is challenging. The number of instruments that measure various aspects of IPECP, or in various sites is growing, however. The Interprofessional Professionalism Assessment (IPA) measures observable behaviors of health care professionals-in-training that demonstrate professionalism and collaboration when working with other health care providers in the context of people-centered care. The IPA instrument was created by the Interprofessional Professionalism Collaborative (IPC), a national group representing 12 entry-level health professions and one medical education assessment organization. The instrument was created and evaluated over several years through a comprehensive, multi-phasic process: 1) development of construct and observable behaviors, 2) instrument design, expert review and cognitive interviews, and 3) psychometric testing. The IPA contains 26 items representing six domains of professionalism (altruism and caring, excellence, ethics, respect, communication, accountability), and was tested by 233 preceptors rating health profession learners in the final year of their practical training. These preceptors represented 30 different academic institutions across the U.S., worked in various types of practice sites, and evaluated learners representing 10 different entry-level health professions. Exploratory factor analysis suggested four factors (communication, respect, excellence, altruism and caring) using 21 items with the least amount of missing data, and confirmed, for the most part, a priori expectations. Internal consistency reliability coefficients for the entire instrument and its four subscales were high (all greater than 0.9). Psychometric results demonstrate aspects of the IPA's reliability and validity and its use across multiple health professions and in various practice sites.

Integration of Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Into Practice: Academic-Practice Partnership's Role.

There is a trend to adopt the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) competencies into nursing practice's organizational activities. Incorporating the competencies has created unique challenges for the practice setting. The purpose of this article is to identify the different types of academic-practice partnerships that promote quality and safety, including a specific focus on how the QSEN competencies are being incorporated into practice settings.

Patient and Family Engagement Summit: Needed Changes in Clinical Practice.

Patient and family engagement is a strategy to enhance healthcare outcomes through strong clinician-patient partnerships. A new care delivery process, in which the patient is the driver of the healthcare team, is required to achieve optimal health. A summit partially funded by a seed grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow Alumni Foundation was held with interprofessional colleagues and patient representatives to identify needed clinical competencies and future practice changes. Recommended shifts in the care delivery process included a focus on patient strengths, including the patient as a valued team member, doing care "with me" and not "to me," and considering all entities or providers including the patient, as equal partners.

Integrating Compassionate, Collaborative Care (the "Triple C") Into Health Professional Education to Advance the Triple Aim of Health Care.

Empathy and compassion provide an important foundation for effective collaboration in health care. Compassion (the recognition of and response to the distress and suffering of others) should be consistently offered by health care professionals to patients, families, staff, and one another. However, compassion without collaboration may result in uncoordinated care, while collaboration without compassion may result in technically correct but depersonalized care that fails to meet the unique emotional and psychosocial needs of all involved. Providing compassionate, collaborative care (CCC) is critical to achieving the "triple aim" of improving patients' health and experiences of care while reducing costs. Yet, values and skills related to CCC (or the "Triple C") are not routinely taught, modeled, and assessed across the continuum of learning and practice. To change this paradigm, an interprofessional group of experts recently recommended approaches and a framework for integrating CCC into health professional education and postgraduate training as well as clinical care. In this Perspective, the authors describe how the Triple C framework can be integrated and enhance existing competency standards to advance CCC across the learning and practice continuum. They also discuss strategies for partnering with patients and families to improve health professional education and health care design and delivery through quality improvement projects. They emphasize that compassion and collaboration are important sources of professional, patient, and family satisfaction as well as critical aspects of professionalism and person-centered, relationship-based high-quality care.

Leveraging Quality and Safety Education for Nurses to Enhance Graduate-Level Nursing Education and Practice.

The purpose of this article is to provide information about the efforts to educate faculty teaching in graduate programs about the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) competencies, provide examples of teaching strategies for each graduate competency, and finally provide information about the outcomes of the graduate-faculty QSEN project. Examples are given of the critical QSEN work that remains to be done to ensure that care for patients and communities is high quality, safe, and reliable.

Taking a "deep dive" on integrating QSEN content in San Francisco Bay Area Schools of Nursing.

While the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) initiative launched a national movement to improve the education of prelicensure nursing students, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funded a series of activities in California over 4 years (2009-2013) to support the implementation and evaluation of the impact of incorporating the QSEN content into nursing curricula in 22 schools of nursing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The purpose of this article is to describe this work, which included a series of workshops for faculty and clinical leaders, support for curricular revision and academic-clinical partnerships, a longitudinal evaluation of the impact of incorporating the QSEN competencies into these schools of nursing, and a set of "deep dives" in a subset of these schools through on-site visits. Early results show that the Moore Foundation initiative is making a difference. The majority of schools have instituted many of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes for the 6 competencies; significant curricular change is occurring; and academic-clinical partnerships have been strengthened.

Diffusing QSEN competencies across schools of nursing: the AACN/RWJF Faculty Development Institutes.

A series of regional Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) Faculty Development Institutes were held in 2010 and 2011 to provide nursing faculty with strategies to integrate quality and safety content into their curricula. The interactive coursework focused on the 6 core QSEN competencies. Using a train-the-trainer approach, the QSEN Faculty Development Institute Directors enabled nursing faculty attendees to (a) lead their institution's faculty to incorporate quality and safety content into the curriculum for students; (b) teach and mentor students to deliver high quality and safe patient care; and (c) train other faculty to accomplish these goals. Over 1,100 nursing faculty from across the United States attended the institutes. All types of prelicensure programs were represented including diploma, associate, and baccalaureate degree. In a preinstitute survey, faculty identified multiple opportunities to improve the integration of quality and safety content into curricula including the need for specific content on quality improvement, teamwork and collaboration, and informatics and the need for interprofessional experiences and electronic health record access. Postinstitute evaluations indicated that participants found the content clear, specific, usable, and presented in a format that facilitated thought, reflection, and application. The regional institutes served as a very effective strategy for engaging large numbers of faculty across the country in the QSEN work and for disseminating vital tactics to improve the teaching of quality and safety content.

Defining and measuring construct of interprofessional professionalism.

The Interprofessional Professionalism Collaborative (IPC), convened in 2006, currently consists of 11 national organizations representing health professions programs at the doctoral entry level, and is developing a framework of "interprofessional professionalism" (IPP) around observable behaviors that illustrate what professionalism looks like in the context of interprofessional collaborations focused on patient-, client-, and family-centered care. IPC's goal is to create tools to foster and measure these behaviors in health professionals and students. This paper describes the work of IPC to date and its future plans.

A necessary sea change for nurse faculty development: spotlight on quality and safety.

More than 10 years have passed since the publication of the Institute of Medicine's report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health Care System, yet recent reports indicate that significant strides toward transformational improvement in quality and patient safety are still necessary. Real progress toward superior health care quality requires foundational enhancements in health care education. An urgent need exists for undergraduate nursing programs to strengthen quality and safety knowledge in their curricula. A first step in attaining this goal is to equip baccalaureate nursing faculty with the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to teach these concepts. The first part of this article provides a compelling case for new graduate nurses to have a comprehensive understanding of how quality and safety issues affect patient outcomes. The second part highlights the specific faculty competencies required to teach quality and safety to undergraduate nursing students and offers a framework that faculty can use for professional development in this area. This article is by no means exhaustive but provides a starting point for providing undergraduate nursing faculty with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to assist students to achieve quality and safety competencies in their curricula.