Appraisal of Inter-Professional Education (IPE) in the World and its Importance in Delivery of Health Care.

Inter-professional education is one of the transformations in medical education. Though prevalent more in developed than developing countries for about half a century, but only in the last 10 years has shown an overriding role in various health related fields. Inter-professional or collaborative education was started in order to improve health care delivery by incorporating better communication, team work, assigning responsibilities to individual providers and observing ethical values in a health care setting, among providers of various professional background. World Health Organization and other top rated education agencies have necessitated the role of IPE but with insufficient evidence from different fields of medical practice. The role of IPE has been determined in medical education, by selecting work setting, types of professionals, content of the course, data collection procedures and use of subsequent analysis. Most of the evidence regarding effectiveness of IPE in actual collaborative practice is demonstrated from developed countries. While developing countries basically reported dynamics of IPE and lack enough evidence in evaluating Inter-Professional Practice (IPP). This review is written in order to identify the global incidence of IPE and particularly that of the developing world. An attempt has been made to identify the gaps in available literature for its fields of practice or research techniques applied in IPE and the types of its domains that has been studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]