Over the past half century, there have been ebbs and flows of interest in linking what is now called interprofessional education (IPE) with inter- professional collaboration and team-based care. As a result, a commitment to designing, implementing, and evaluating IPE curricula also has come in and out of favour. Since the mid-2000s, concerns about the quality and cost of health care, limited access to care for some groups and populations, and patient safety, together with increasing interest in transforming health professions education, have stimulated a resurgence of interest in IPE as a viable approach to developing interprofessional competencies for effective collaborative practice (IOM, 2000, 2001). Today, however, as contemporary health care approaches have become more outcomes-based, so have the questions raised about the impact and effectiveness of IPE (Cerra and Brandt, 2011; IPEC, 2011). Whereas considerable research has focused on student learning, only recently have researchers begun to look beyond the classroom and beyond learning outcomes for the impact of IPE on such issues as patient safety, patient and provider satisfaction, quality of care, health promotion, population health, and the cost of care (Moore et al., 2009; Walsh et al., 2014).
