Journal of interprofessional care
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Community paramedicine (CP) is an evolving method of providing community-based health care in which paramedics function outside of their traditional emergency response roles in order to improve access to primary and preventive health care and to basic social services. Early evidence indicates that CP programs have contributed to reducing health care utilization and improving patient outcomes leading some to call for a transformation of EMS into value-based mobile healthcare fully integrated within an interprofessional care team. The purpose of this scoping review was to understand the evidence base of CP in order to inform the further evolution of this model of care. ⋯ Further, the extent to which community paramedics operate within interprofessional teams remains unclear. However, some programs demonstrated improvement in both health services and patient outcomes. As stakeholders continue to explore the potential of CP, results of this review highlight the importance of further investigation of outcomes, the professional identity of the community paramedic, and the role of the community paramedic on interprofessional teams.
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Interprofessional education (IPE) has been adopted in many educational systems to prepare students in the health professions for team-based practice, but its implementation is still limited in many countries. In preparation for the introduction of IPE within Kuwait University Health Sciences Center, a cross-sectional survey was conducted to explore the attitudes of faculty members (academic staff/academic support staff) toward collaborative practice and IPE, their training needs, and perceived barriers to implementing IPE. Two hundred and ten individuals completed the survey (60% response rate). ⋯ A longitudinal curriculum was less popular than discrete IPE experiences. The top reported barriers to implementing IPE were leadership challenges (86.6%), curriculum challenges (82.4%), teaching challenges (81.4%), and resistance to change (80.5%). These findings have implications for developing strategies to engage faculty in effective IPE initiatives internationally.