The National Center team created the NexusIPE™ Leadership Academy based upon our experience to get to what matters most for health by bringing practice and education leaders together. Recognizing the importance of starting with a strong IPE program, our focus begins with supporting IPE programs in moving beyond traditional models of pre-professional learning to partnerships between community systems, practice, health systems and higher education in order to accelerate a student’s readiness for practice in meaningful ways while adding value to the clinical setting and the patients served.

Designed for those committed to leading and learning with practice partners, our learning resources focus on supporting thriving clinical learning environments, with an approach that supports learners actively contributing to practice outcomes that matter most to the individuals, families, communities and populations served. 

An IPE Paradigm Flip

Interprofessional practice and education (IPE) starts with the knowledge and evidence that by working and collaborating together health professionals can improve health. We are working toward a vision that we may not see every day. We tell students we are teaching them lessons in the classroom to be collaboration-ready, even though they may not see what we teach in practice. 

• We design educational and clinical practice programs that we believe will lead to our vision and Quadruple Aim goals. 
• We seek "evidence" that what we are doing is right and effective to justify our approach - even though there is a gap between when we introduce IPE and when it is needed. 
• We look for tools and tricks to make it work. 
• We look to peer institutions for trends and "best practices."

IPE brings perennial and predictable challenges and even heartaches - transitions and frequent flux of senior leaders, competing agendas and resources, questioning impact, lack of understanding about what the goals of the IPE are, and a "checklist" mentality to meeting accreditation standards rather than a deep commitment to transformational culture (B.F. Brandt et al., 2023). This work is honorable and important, but is it getting us the results we seek? Intuitively, we know the dominant model of IPE in classrooms needs to flip into practice. 

IPE Leadership for a Shifting Environment

Today, there are signs and symptoms that the foundation that re-energized IPE in 2000 is shifting as societal problems grow more compex and intractable. We are facing headwinds that require making adjustments in real time. Single technical solutions focused on specific problems will no longer work in the rapidly shifting environment. We need to develop new skills to build upon traditional approaches and the solid foundation we have laid for IPE. This will require us to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves. The good news is that those who have been involved the IPE renaissance are equipped with making this needed shift. 

Practicing and educating in teams of different health professions intuitively makes sense, and indeed patients expect this to be the norm. However, if we are honest with ourselves, we know that our educational and healthcare systems have been designed and built based on myriad perverse incentives that drive outcomes in different directions than those we intend. Because of ideologies, cultures, systems barriers, and traditions, what needs to be done is daunting.