In 2012 Dr. Peggy Wisdom with the Wisdom Family Foundation provided support for the evaluation of the need and feasibility of OUHSC to develop a formal interprofessional education program for our health professions students. Dr. Wisdom had been fortunate to have experienced many positive interprofessional collaborations since beginning her career as a neurologist. Having worked with interprofessional teams caring for persons who had experienced life-changing conditions such as traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and stroke convinced her that not only can a team of professionals have a positive impact on the ultimate outcome after injury or illness but that patients and their families are likely to be more satisfied with consistent information from team members and one patient-centered care plan rather than the traditional plans submitted by multiple health care professionals.

However, it was her own personal experience with a life- changing illness that instilled the notion to start working toward development of a formal interprofessional education program for all our students at OUHSC. After her illness she began to look at the components of interprofessional teams she was working on and recognized that students from all our educational programs were not a part of the teams. She believed that if students representing the various professions could participate in supervised clinical collaborations they would be better prepared to transition to clinical practice as “Team-Ready” health care professionals. The benefit of being “Team-Ready” as a student results in improved efficiency and effectiveness of a team as students are trained in Interprofessional Competencies before they become practioners . If a student has the training and experience in knowing the roles and responsibilities of health professions, communicating between health professions, team-based skills needed to be effective and values of a successful team they are more likely to be ready to accept the challenges of teams they participate in upon graduation.

Clearly OUHSC had highly qualified faculty resources for interprofessional education on campus as she had benefited from interprofessional collaboration early in her career while at O’Donoghue Rehabilitation Institute. The Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Allied Health, Public Health, Pharmacy and Nursing were graduating well educated students. We also had a successful Faculty Development Program for all OUHSC faculties which promoted interprofessional collaboration. However we were all working in silos and we needed an opportunity to expand our resources to include interprofessional education. Once Dr. Wisdom called upon several of her colleagues to discuss the feasibility of interprofessional collaboration, it did not take long for a core group of faculty to start to work by literature searches, attending interprofessional conference’s and scheduling regular meetings to develop the concept of interprofessional education for our campus. This collaboration has led to the development of All Professions Day which is a curriculum designed around Interprofessional Competencies and team-building active learning exercises. This year OUHSC is able to begin annual All Professions Day sessions so that all of our students will have the education and training in interprofessional collaboration.