Integration of Interprofessional Education (IPE) Core Competencies Into Health Care Education: IPE Meets Culinary Medicine

“Interprofessional education [IPE] occurs when students from ≥2 professions learn about, from and with each other, to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes.” To address the complex needs of today's patients, the Institutes of Medicine Committee on Quality Health Care in America suggested that health care professionals train and work as interprofessional teams. The Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel further quantified IPE, identifying 4 interprofessional core competencies: values and ethics for interprofessional practice, understanding roles and responsibilities of other health care disciplines, interprofessional communications, and teamwork. Within the framework of these core competencies, the goal of IPE in health care is to reduce communication errors, enhance knowledge and perception of others’ roles, and improve coordination of health care goals within a team, thereby ultimately improving patient outcomes, adherence to guidelines regarding standards of care, and patient satisfaction. ^,  Although it is early to determine the impact of IPE conclusively, and evaluation is made challenging by both the complex nature of health care systems and variation in IPE endeavors, preliminary results suggest a neutral to positive impact on actual patient outcomes. Accordingly, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics supports IPE in nutrition as a component of medical education and suggests that registered dietitians/nutritionists assist in educating medical students to improve understanding of the registered dietitians/nutritionists’ role in the care team. One component of IPE that has not been well studied is whether a nontraditional method of IPE in health care, such as a culinary medicine course, would result in improvement of student perceptions of team performance. The purpose of this project was to use a culinary medicine course to strengthen teamwork between nutrition and medical students, thereby providing a collaborative environment in which they could also develop a better understanding of the others’ respective scopes of practice and establishing groundwork for effective interprofessional communication though IPE.