Inter Health Professionals Alliance: Student initiatives as a doorway into collaborative practice within the health home

Future healthcare delivery systems will need to respond to increasingly complex population health needs with coordinated interprofessional (IP) collaboration. Preparing a provider workforce equipped to practice effectively within a patient-centered health home is at the heart of IP education. The Medical College of Virginia Campus at Virginia Commonwealth University celebrates the 5^th anniversary of a student-led organization known as the Inter Health Professionals Alliance (IHPA), whose goal is to develop the knowledge and skills of interdisciplinary practice by fostering lasting relationships rooted in teamwork and collaboration. These goals are accomplished through a series of monthly activities, including the creation of an interdisciplinary patient education newsletter written at a public-appropriate reading level focusing on a monthly topic, facilitating case-based seminar discussion in Educate Then Advocate sessions on the same topic, and providing patient education and blood pressure checks at a local grocery store in an underserved neighborhood of the Richmond City community. Participatory Action Research has elucidated the benefits of IP involvement through the IHPA model, and a recent campus-wide mixed-methods survey explored IHPA student members’ perceptions of IP education, how these influence participation in optional, student-led IP opportunities, and how students expect to apply these IP experiences into their practice as future healthcare providers. Alongside formal curricular inclusion of IP education, which is increasingly mandated through accreditation standards, IHPA has demonstrated the enthusiastic potential of student-led initiatives to organically equip developing healthcare professionals with the knowledge and hands-on skills to practice collaboratively across disciplines in a patient-centered health home perspective.