Diversifying Interprofessionalism: Who’s Missing from the Table?

Seminar Description: Proponents of interprofessional education and practice have great opportunity to think beyond the traditional health care team by considering the wide variety of health and social care professionals who serve our communities in their unique and distinct ways. For example, graduates of health-related programs from community colleges provide many of these essential services; yet, they are frequently missing from interprofessional discussions.

When these professions are not included in important conversations about health and social care services, then how inclusive is interprofessionalism? When these professions are absent, diversity of thought is also absent. When diversity of thought is absent, then diversity of persons on our interprofessional teams is absent. If diversity of persons, thoughts, and professions are absent, then we must ask ourselves “how just, equitable, and inclusive are our interprofessional efforts, really?”

This workshop will encourage participant and/or institutional self-assessment, reflection, and action planning about diversity of professions within their institutions, IPE programming, and leadership. These professions may be graduates or students of community colleges and universities and may include clinical, nonclinical, technical, and support personnel. By including these professionals, diversity of thought, persons, and identities grows. By promoting inclusion of diverse, high impact, contributing professionals to patient/client care teams, seats at our interprofessional tables will be filled by the right players at the right time for delivering the highest quality and safest care to consumers of our services.

The Summit’s theme “Interprofessional Collaboration to Address Health Equity, Racism and Bias in Interprofessional Practice” will be addressed by highlighting incomplete diversity of professions and personal identities, which, consequently, contributes to perpetuation of implicit biases, institutional barriers, structural racism, and inequity of not only members of the interprofessional team, but also of consumers of care. Patient/client care is enhanced by a diverse workforce, and analyzing professional diversity of interprofessional teams will contribute toward societal justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (JEDI+B).

After attending this session, learners will be able to:
-Engage in critical self and organizational assessment of interprofessional inclusion for determining which professions are missing from their "interprofessional tables"
-Identify the critical insights that members of these missing professions might contribute to the interprofessional dialogue for enhancing patient/client outcomes
-Identify and share at least one action item to increase diversity of professions on their interprofessional team(s)

Knowledge gained from this workshop may be immediately actionable by the creation of a tangible plan for diversifying professions on their interprofessional teams through the lens of JEDI+B (justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging)

Learning objectives will be achieved by including interactive discussions through chat contributions, word clouds, small group discussion, and building a collective Google Doc that captures group-based action items and then shared with all participants. Lastly, the next scheduled AIHC Social Hour will be the follow-up portion to this workshop for a check-in on progress on action items and plans. This topic will be easily generalizable to Social Hour guests who did not engage in the Summit workshop through encouragement to offer in-the-moment contributions to topic.