Interprofessional education in geriatric medicine

The majority of older patients present with complex health needs that often require to be addressed by more than one discipline. Hence, the involvement of physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists and other disciplines, adopting a patient-centred interprofessional approach, is an essential component of successful care. A growing phenomenon in education is interprofessional education (IPE), in which various health professionals learn with, from and about another in order to improve collaboration and the quality of care. This article presents a geriatric medicine literature review on IPE, covering several studies that have examined such education, describing different types of intervention and the involvement of various health professionals. There was no clear evidence that could be drawn from the available literature about best practice and intervention, due to the differences in interventions and the lack of replication studies. In this article, we have also reviewed the theories on which IPE is based and its suitability for application to the discipline of geriatric medicine (e.g. regarding curriculum design, clinical practice, and the optimisation of collaboration between team members). Present evidence supports the assumption that IPE-related general principles are applicable to education in geriatric medicine.