For the past 10 years, UBC Health’s Integrated Curriculum has helped future health professionals learn how to work together. What started as a new approach to interprofessional education (IPE) is now one of UBC’s largest collaborative learning programs. The goal is simple: help students build the teamwork and communication skills needed for better patient care. 

Today, the curriculum brings together students from 14 health professional programs at UBC distributed across 5 sites throughout the province. Through interprofessional workshops and online activities, students learn with, from and about one another. Every year, roughly 2,000 students take part. 

The program was 20 years in the making. Prior to this curriculum, interprofessional learning was an extra-curricular add-on.  

“While interprofessional education has been around for a long time, it has not been easy to implement,” says Dr. Lesley Bainbridge, Associate Professor Emeritus in UBC’s Department of Physical Therapy and former Vice-Principal of the College of Health Disciplines. 

“One of the biggest challenges has been finding time in each program’s curriculum to fit IPE. Just over 10 years ago, the team in the College of Health Disciplines at UBC started to explore the concept of an integrated IPE curriculum. Rather than seeing IPE as an add on, the idea was to build it into each program’s curriculum in areas that all programs need to cover.” 

That idea became the foundation for the Integrated Curriculum. Instead of treating interprofessional learning as an extra activity, UBC Health and its partner programs worked to make it part of regular student learning. 

“With a commitment from the programs to find dedicated time for IPE in their curricula, the concept of an integrated curriculum was born,” says Bainbridge.  

The Integrated Curriculum officially launched in 2016 with a series of ethics modules. The program combined online learning with interprofessional workshops. Ethics was chosen as the first topic because it affects every health profession. Students worked through real healthcare situations together and learned how different professions approach patient care and decision-making. 

Over time, the curriculum expanded. Today, it includes six main topics: Professionalism, Ethics, Indigenous Cultural Safety, Health Informatics, Substance Use and Collaborative Decision-Making.  

The curriculum focuses on skills needed for collaborative healthcare. Students learn about communication, teamwork, leadership and patient-centred care. These skills are important in today’s healthcare system, where care is often delivered by teams instead of individual providers working alone. 

Partnerships have been important to the program’s success. One key partnership is with the Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Health, which co-leads the Indigenous Cultural Safety parts of the curriculum. Together, the partners help ensure students receive learning grounded in culturally safe and respectful care. 

Ten years after it launched, the Integrated Curriculum has become more than a series of workshops. It has helped create a stronger culture of collaboration in health professional education at UBC. 

As Bainbridge reflects, the long-term vision has always extended beyond the classroom, “enabling interprofessional practice to become part of each health and human service student’s philosophy upon graduation.”