UNE's InterProfessional Education Collaborative receives grant to create online tool for future health care professionals

University of New England's Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) has received a $19,894 grant from The Bingham Program to create an online learning tool designed to introduce all incoming graduate students and new faculty to interprofessional competencies and practices.

The Bingham Program grant funds the first two of six modules, which address four core interprofessional competencies: 

• knowledge of the roles and responsibilities of other health professions;
• interprofessional and interpersonal communication;
• teamwork;
• ethics.

The modules were designed with input from an expert panel including representatives from the American Associations of Colleges of Nursing, the American Dental Education Association, the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the Association of Schools of Public Health, and the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The modules will be collaboratively designed in conjunction with UNE's Add Verb Productions and interdisciplinary faculty teams, and will be available for use by the fall of 2012.

The Bingham Program grant was co-submitted by Shelley Cohen Konrad,Ph.D., UNE's IPEC director and associate professor in the School of Social Work, and Karen Pardue, the associate dean of the Westbrook College of Health Professions.

The Bingham Program is a charitable endowment established in 1932 to promote health and advance medicine in Maine. 

UNE educates the most health care professionals in Maine, and is one of only five private universities with a comprehensive health education mission including medical, pharmaceutical and allied health programs, and will admit its first class to the College of Dental Medicine in the fall of 2013.