Theme: Nursing education, management and leadership.

Inter-professional collaboration is essential for safe, high-quality, patient-centered care (Shanahan and Lewis 2015). In order to set the stage for inter-professional collaboration, inter-professional education should be incorporated into the learning experience of health professionals (Reese et al 2010).

In this presentation I will share the development of two undergraduate inter-professional education pilot projects and the evaluations from these. This comprised of two projects: children’s nursing students and occupational therapy students, and children’s nursing students and fourth-year medical students. Each had a different focus: the first is based upon assessment of a child in a community simulation, whilst the second focused on the inter-professional assessment of the acutely ill child.

I will present the results of these two successful inter-professional simulation innovations and then discuss the future of inter-professional education. I will conclude by presenting our current project which is a practice-based inter-professional education intervention involving up to eight professional groups.