Breaking Down the Silos: Interprofessional Education Certificate of Honors Program

The University of New Mexico (UNM) Health Sciences, Office of Interprofessional Education designed and implemented an innovative interprofessional education (IPE) Honors program, the first in the United States, in the Summer of 2019. This program was built through a dynamic and responsive partnership with health professions students from multiple programs. The program was piloted in the 2019/2020 academic year and upon graduation in May 2020, the first twenty students were awarded a certificate of IPE Honors. The designed program addressed the barriers and challenges to IPE participation at the organizational level while facilitating creative engagement from the students. We designed the IPE Honors program to value and highlight the innovative interprofessional extracurricular and intercurricular student work. Individual program accreditation and documentation of outcome requirements are supported using a reflective learning IPE evaluation tool that captures the quality and quantity of student IPE experiences. We inventoried both intercurricular and extracurricular IPE activities and experiences. We then mapped these activities to seven categories that were correlated with the behaviors of Interprofessional Professionalism (Frost et al., 2019) and the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) Competencies (Barr, 1998). Through group meetings and a pilot assessment, we felt confident that students could gain sufficient experience and practice with the interprofessional behaviors to achieve the IPEC competencies. We designed the IPE Honors program to highlight, build, and assess the quality of IPE experiences across the HSC while accounting for the extracurricular student IPE experiences. This program is innovative, flexible, sustainable, and can be replicated.