Interprofessional education for the next 50 years

Over the past two decades, there have been important changes to interprofessional education in Australia and New Zealand. Interprofessional education has slowly shifted from peripheral, small-scale education activities attended by volunteer students to become an expectation of many health professional courses to meet accreditation requirements and community expectations of a collaborative healthcare system. In Australia, interprofessional education curricula have been facilitated by increased accreditation expectations and a series of national large-scale funded projects. However, despite declarations of intent and direction, strategic implementation of nationwide recommendations has not been achieved. In New Zealand, large-scale funding has not been available to facilitate the implementation of interprofessional education in the professional courses. Instead, interprofessional education initiatives have been driven by a small group of champions. Furthermore, efforts to achieve the World Health Organization’s (2010) vision of interprofessional education across the education spectrum—to ensure the future and current health workforce have the competencies for interprofessional collaboration—have been hampered in our region by the focus on interprofessional education within tertiary education. This paper outlines the transnational status of interprofessional education and the role of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators (ANZAHPE) and the Australasian Interprofessional Practice and Education Network (AIPPEN) in progress to date. We conclude with several suggestions for future interprofessional education across our two countries.