Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions



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CURRENT ISSUE BACK ISSUES SUBSCRIBE ADVERTISE ABOUT JCEHP FOR AUTHORS JCEHP AWARD SEARCH (Members only) FULL-TEXT		Volume 29 (2) Volume 29, Issue 2, Spring 2009 J Contin Educ Health Prof 2009; 29(2):84 FOUNDATIONS OF CONTINUING EDUCATION Health care improvement and continuing interprofessional education: Continuing interprofessional development to improve patient outcomes Peter M. Wilcock, Gillian Janes, Alison Chambers A b s t r a c t Health care improvement and continuing professional education must be better understood if we are to promote continuous service improvement through interprofessional learning in the workplace. We propose that situating interprofessional working, interprofessional learning, work-based learning, and service improvement within a framework of social learning theory creates a continuum between work-based interprofessional learning and service improvement in which each is integral to the other. This continuum provides a framework for continuing interprofessional development that enables service improvement in the workplace to serve as a vehicle through which individual professionals and teams can continually enhance patient care through working and learning together. The root of this lies in understanding that undertaking improvement and learning about improvement are co-dependent and that health care professionals must recognize their responsibility to improve as well as complete their everyday work. We believe that significant opportunities exist for health care commissioners, service providers, and educational institutions to work together to promote continuing interprofessional development in the workplace to enhance patient outcomes, and we outline some of the opportunities we believe exist. Lessons for Practice Focusing on patients' needs provides a motivating purpose for both health care improvement and for professional education. Continuing interprofessional development must be based on social learning in the workplace if health care professionals are to learn new skills that improve services and outcomes for patients. Health care professionals and teams must understand their two jobs: doing their work and improving it. Continuous improvement depends on moving beyond context-specific improvement projects to creating the conditions for continuous reflection as part of everyday practice. Patients and care givers must be intimately involved in designing and delivering both improved care and CIPD. Health care commissioners, providers of care, and educational institutions must work together innovatively to establish the imperative and the social learning conditions necessary for CIPD that improves the quality of health care.
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