Interprofessional Continuing Education Courses

If we truly want to improve patient care, the best way to do it is not through the siloed efforts of individuals or professions.

The most effective way to create sustainable change is to change how the healthcare team collaborates.

And one of the most effective ways to improve team collaboration is to look upstream, to how we are educated.

That means pursuing interprofessional education.

The World Health Organization defines interprofessional education (IPE) as two or more professions learning with, from, and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care. When that learning happens after school, as part of our professional development, it is called interprofessional continuing education (IPCE).

In this post, we'll share how OT Potential is approaching interprofessional continuing education, which of our courses are tagged as interprofessional, and our growing resources for understanding whether our courses meet your CE requirements.

Our Approach: CE That Is By, For, and With the Team

OT Potential began focused on occupational therapy. But we quickly realized that implementing best practice is truly a team effort. So we expanded our courses to include the perspectives of other disciplines, and we expanded our ownership team to match. Today our owners include occupational therapists, a physical therapist, and a physician

That same team-based thinking now shapes how we plan every interprofessional course. Here is what it looks like in practice.

By the team. For each course, we start by asking which professions are affected by the practice gap the topic addresses. If the answer is more than one, we recruit a guest expert from one of those professions (most often PT, speech-language pathology, or counseling) to co-plan the course with me. Together we choose the research articles, build the agenda, and shape the questions. Every interprofessional course is planned by at least two professions.

For the team. The professions that plan the course are the professions the course is designed to reach. Our learning objectives focus heavily on roles and responsibilities: recognizing what each team member contributes and how those contributions fit together.

With the team. Our live webinar format means you don't just hear about collaboration, you watch it happen. A guest from another profession and I reason through the evidence together, and the jargon, assumptions, and scope questions that keep us siloed come right to the surface. Live attendees from different professions bring their own cases into the chat and Q&A. The recording preserves that dialogue for everyone who takes the course on demand.

And we measure it. Every course has a post-course quiz. For interprofessional courses, those questions test your understanding of the team roles laid out in the evidence. We have also added a short interprofessional self-assessment to our post-course survey, adapted from the Interprofessional Collaborative Competency Attainment Survey (ICCAS), so we can see whether a course actually shifts how you think about your role on the team. (Heads up: that's the extra question you'll now see at the end of our courses.)

Our Interprofessional Courses

Almost all of our courses could be beneficial to members of the team outside of OT. But to be tagged as interprofessional, a course also has to be planned by an interprofessional team and designed for more than one profession.

Here are the courses that currently meet that bar (newest first):

You'll notice a theme. The strongest evidence we cover tends to have an interprofessional flair, because the things that most move patient outcomes (sleep, reimbursement models, documentation, safety) don't belong to any one profession.

We'll keep this list updated as new courses are released. You can find all of our courses in the OT Potential Club.

Do Our Interprofessional Courses Meet Your CE Requirements?

This is the question we get most, and the honest answer is: it depends on your profession and your state.

OT Potential has been an AOTA Approved Provider since 2020. If you are an OT or OTA, start with our guide to OT continuing education requirements by state.

If you are a PT or PTA, we've put together a guide to physical therapy CEU requirements by state, including how boards tend to treat courses from providers approved by other professions.

If you are an SLP, counselor, or another member of the team, your board sets its own rules for what counts. Our courses include the details you'd need to submit for credit (learning objectives, agenda, speaker disclosures, and a certificate of completion), but we always recommend checking with your licensing board first.

We are building out this guidance for each profession we serve, and we'll link new resources here as they're ready.

Where Therapy Stands Overall in IPE

Even though therapy professionals tend to work on highly integrated teams, we have been laggards in interprofessional education, especially in the United States.

Medicine, nursing, and pharmacy founded Joint Accreditation for Interprofessional Continuing Education, and professions like dentistry, psychology, social work, dietetics, optometry, and athletic training have since joined as collaborating accreditors. AOTA, APTA, and ASHA have not.

This has created a disjointed reality. Interprofessional competencies have been baked into our school curricula, with OT, PT, and SLP programs building on the IPEC core competencies. But there is no formal pathway for recognizing interprofessional learning in our continuing education.

So most of us learned to collaborate in school, entered practice on teams that didn't always support it, and then spent our CE hours back in our professional silos.

At OT Potential, we can't change this larger reality. But we are charting a new path forward for our own CE delivery.

If you want to go deeper on why this matters, listen to our podcast conversation with OT researcher Michael Sy, PhD, on interprofessional education. His hope, which we share, is that interprofessional learning stops being an optional add-on and becomes a normal part of professional development for every member of the team.

More Interprofessional Resources

Frameworks

• Framework for Action on Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (WHO). The 2010 framework that gave us the shared definition of IPE and tied it to patient safety and team-based care.

• IPEC Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice. The four competency domains (values and ethics, roles and responsibilities, communication, and teams and teamwork) that US health professions programs build their IPE curricula around.

• CIHC Competency Framework for Advancing Collaboration (2024). The updated Canadian framework with six domains, including relationship-focused care, role clarification, conflict management, and collaborative leadership. Nice visuals if you want a one-page picture of what collaboration involves.

Measuring interprofessional competence

• National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (Nexus): Assessment and Evaluation. A searchable collection of IPE and collaborative practice measures, with notes on intended use and psychometrics. This is where we found the self-assessment we adapted for our post-course survey.

Interprofessional organizations

• Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) sets the core competencies that health professions programs, including OT, use to build interprofessional education into their curricula.

• Joint Accreditation for Interprofessional Continuing Education lets continuing education providers award credit across professions, including IPCE credit for activities planned by the team, for the team.

Have a question about whether a specific course fits your CE needs? Reach out to us. We would love to hear what the team needs from us next.