Inter-Professional Education (IPE), Essay Example

Inter-professional education (IPE) can be defined as an initiative involving learners and educators from varied professions and foundational disciplines of healthcare with an aim of joining together to come up with  a collaborative learning environment. The main purpose of the union is to engage in development of knowledge, skills and attitudes that enhance competence as well as inter-professional team behavior. For healthcare profession students, the concept of Inter-professional education is very important as it gives them skills to be able to provide healthcare services in a collaborative team environment. This subsequently improves patient care, reduce costs and minimize medical related errors. As a team, the professionals will be able to learn a lot by sharing ideas within the team. They will also be able to approach various medical situations as a team and this increases the chances of succeeding in various complex medical situations.

Value based purchasing (VBP) is a strategy on the demand side of healthcare system that is used in measuring, reporting and rewarding excellence in delivery of healthcare services. The essence of VBP is to bring together major stakeholders in the healthcare industry including individual customers, public sectors purchasers and employer purchasers to make decisions that will ensure accessibility, quality, efficiency and alignment of medical services and incentives. Effective and high performing healthcare providers are rewarded and this improves their reputation. This initiative acts as a motivation factor for other healthcare providers to improve their performance by improving general quality of patient care. The relationship between inter-professional education and value based purchasing is as follows. Although both initiatives take different approaches, they all converge towards ensuring that the quality of healthcare services provided are of improved status through aiming at improving the quality of patient care.