CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS FOR INTEGRATING INTERPROFESSIONAL EDUCATION AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE (IPECP) INTO SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION ACROSS CULTURES

The social work profession has always emphasised the need to collaborate with other professionals to achieve holistic outcomes for clients. However, in many social work programmes, this emphasis has not been commensurate with curriculum structure to prepare students for interprofessional practice. In Africa, social work students and their professional allies are rarely put together for interprofessional education (IPE) purposes, and, in other parts of the world, few social work institutions offer IPE opportunities for their students. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is promoting IPE as critical pedagogy for future health workers; thus, students from healthcare disciplines and healthcare professionals tend to be more involved in IPE programmes than are social workers. As part of efforts to promote interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) among social workers, faculty from three universities in Ghana and the United States of America collaborated to develop an IPECP curriculum. Centred around the Ubuntu philosophy, the curriculum was designed to provide cross-cultural interprofessional learning opportunities for social work and allied health students. This chapter provides an overview of IPE in Africa and the United States. It offers insights into the curriculum design process, and makes some recommendations from lessons learned.