Effective interprofessional communication is essential for high-quality, safe, and coordinated care across all healthcare settings. This communication spans verbal and written exchanges, digital and analogue tools, and includes both synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Despite this complexity, current interprofessional education frequently centers on hospital-based, face-to-face scenarios, which do not reflect the distributed, episodic, and often layered communication that occurs in practice. As a result, a disconnect often exists between what students are taught and what they encounter in real-world practice.
In response, educators from nine health professions at the University of Melbourne, Australia, including audiology, dentistry, medicine, nursing, optometry, physiotherapy, psychology, social work, and speech pathology, collaborated to design a suite of video resources that model authentic interprofessional communication. These resources focus on key observable behaviors including negotiating priorities, bridging professional silos, navigating hierarchy, and responding to evolving patient needs. These co-created scenarios are grounded in everyday practice and incorporate common communication barriers such as professional hierarchies, variable schedule, and discipline specific jargon.
This presentation will highlight a scalable, collaborative model for interprofessional curriculum innovation. It demonstrates how educators can co-create shared learning resources that are adaptable across programs and institutions, enhancing both relevance and efficiency. The process fostered interdisciplinary learning and built shared ownership of interprofessional education delivery.
The talk will outline the design process used to develop the interprofessional communication resources, including video-based scenarios. We will also present the developed examples and how they are incorporated into the University of Melbourne interprofessional education curriculum. These resources provide students with practical, context-specific strategies to navigate real-world interprofessional communication, supporting better teamwork, more inclusive patient care, and reduced communication-related risk. The collaborative model also reduces redundancy by offering shared resources for embedding communication learning across health curricula.
By developing curricula informed by practice-based research, the project helps bridge the gap between education and practice. This approach contributes to evidence informed curricula that reflects the complex, distributed, and often asynchronous nature of communication in healthcare. It enhances teamwork by equipping students with practical, context-specific skills that improve collaboration and patient care. By preparing learners for communication challenges they will face in practice, the initiative supports both improved care delivery and greater workforce readiness.