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Bronwyn Clark
There was a time when a white coat or a title was enough for people to trust us - but is that still true today?
The healthcare landscape is shifting rapidly, shaped by expanding scopes of practice, digital misinformation, and growing planetary health concerns. As polarisation deepens and these forces reshape our healthcare system, it is clear that trust in many aspects of society has diminished. The pandemic shone light on this, especially in the context of vaccinations, and it became a clear example of how trust - or the lack of it - shapes health outcomes.
So, how do we rebuild and maintain trust - between patients and their healthcare providers, and between professions?
It starts with how we learn. In particular - learning together through Interprofessional Education (IPE). It's essential for students to understand that if they’re not trusted by patients, it can hinder care. And just as important: if healthcare teams don’t trust each other, patient outcomes suffer.
This is our eighth year running our flagship IPE Colloquium event. What started as a way of us responding to an identified area for focus in accreditation has become a lever for developing and driving further research across professions.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) definition of IPE is learning from, with, and about each other. This was the catalyst for the event and has consistently been a key area to discuss and explore across health professions. As an enabler and a connector in the system, APC doesn't just set standards - we collaborate with other accreditation bodies to shape them.
What has become abundantly clear is the voice of the patient - and they're telling us they want collaborative practice. In fact, our recent research, notably through the Health Professions Accreditation Collaborative (HPAC) Forum, has provided us with valuable insights into just how critical it is. This research involved us asking the people who matter most: What do consumers want from their healthcare?
We know as healthcare consumers, that if we go into a care environment, we often have to tell our story more than once to everyone. One of our research papers, titled Patients First and Foremost, emphasises how often patients are required to tell their story multiple times to different members of their care team. This research showed us that patients often assume that everyone in the team is talking to each other. When they find out this isn’t the case, they naturally ask: "Why can’t you? Why can't you just talk to each other?"
If we're not teaching students from the very beginning that they are part of a collaborative team, then we're not going to produce a graduate at the end who actually thinks like that.
And if you don't have trust, you can't have a functional team.
Patrick Lencioni, a well-known expert on team dynamics, describes the dysfunctions that prevent teams from performing at their best. At the foundation of his model is absence of trust - and without trust, the rest of the team’s potential unravels. The same applies in healthcare - without trust, collaboration breaks down.
In hierarchical teams, voices can be lost - especially in traditional medical models. But quality care relies on the expertise of the whole team. Nurses, dietitians, pharmacists - all bring vital perspectives. Without trust, those contributions are missed, and the best decisions may not be made.
In today’s digital world, where information is often shared asynchronously, it’s even more important for healthcare professionals to work as a team. We may not always be in the same room, but we still need to respect and understand the insights shared by our colleagues, rather than defaulting to a hierarchical model where only one voice matters.
The Scope of Practice Review Final Report includes 55 references to trust - many linked to shared and common capabilities. Trust allows team members to rely on each other’s expertise. However, scope of practice often becomes a turf war, especially when professionals take on new responsibilities. But the fact is, many professions, including pharmacy, are now doing things they weren't traditionally trained for. Ten years ago, pharmacists weren’t trusted to administer vaccines. Now, they give around 50% of flu vaccinations in Australia.
As part of its work and its independent accreditation committee, Ahpra is focussing on what an 'interprofessional collaborative practitioner' should and could be.
Ahpra's Accreditation Committee released a statement of intent on interprofessional collaborative practice. This essentially is a shared commitment to working together across professions and has wide support - from accreditors, regulators, universities, health quality bodies, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives - marking a significant step toward more joined-up care across the system.
Now, the focus is on implementation. Through HPAC, we’re leading work on the IPE side, while others in the sector are exploring what this looks like in practice, including in CPD.
From our work as accreditation authorities, we can see that embedding IPE across all health professions and programs is no easy task. Universities face challenges in aligning timetables across cohorts, and for students it's not always easy to step outside their comfort zone and be vulnerable with peers from different disciplines. For health services, how do you ensure that there is interprofessional learning happening within placement? Without professionals consistently modelling collaborative practice, how can we expect students to learn how to work together effectively?
When we assess IPE programs through an accreditation lens, not all fully reflect the "from, with and about" model. Often, students are brought together before they fully understand their own profession, let alone others. For example, pharmacy students early in their training may not yet grasp the scope of their own role, so meaningful interprofessional learning is limited.
Simply putting students in the same lecture theatre or group doesn’t make it IPE. True IPE happens when students engage in shared, practical tasks - where they actively learn from each other and contribute their professional lens to solving real clinical problems. Effective programs give students case-based or scenario-driven activities to focus on the different aspects of a team - it could be cultural safety or quality and safety activities or responding to thunderstorm asthma - where each profession plays a clear, defined role in decision-making.
Rural settings often showcase IPE at its best because collaboration is a necessity, not a choice.
Through our IPE Colloquium event and research, we’ve identified gaps in IPE and ways to embed it more consistently, moving beyond opt-in activities.
We will be exploring the challenges of trust and IPE at this years' IPE Colloquium event, where our aim is not to focus on barriers - it's to showcase the possible - what best practice could look. We have an excellent program with international speakers, which will explore how education can enable trust and produce collaborative practitioners. Some speakers include:
For further reading, our research through the HPAC Forum includes:
