oa The development of a set of shared core IPE competencies and evaluation criteria for Qatar: The process and the product

Interprofessional Education (IPE) is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the process by which a group of practicing health-care professionals work together in order to provide promotive, preventive, curative, rehabilitative and other health-related services. WHO strongly encourages efforts to develop and integrate IPE into educational health-care programs for patients' benefits. For this to occur, a set of shared core competencies must be developed and used as a base on which to build and strengthen interprofessional skills in health-care professionals. Little or no research has been made to develop a set of IPE shared core competencies in Qatar. This article describes the method and results of the competency specification process developed by our team. At a first stage, a list of domains with their descriptions were developed using a card-sorting approach. A pyramid model with IPE at the top was also developed. The second stage was to develop the list of shared core competencies related to the domains developed above. The method used was a Delphi-based approach. One of the necessary steps was to draft candidate competencies based on 8 local experts and review of relevant literature. Based on this, feedback from local experts was integrated in an iterative process. The list of competencies was reduced from 20 statements approximately per domain to an average of 6 statements per domain. A rubric was also developed which can be used to evaluate students on the dimensions outlined in the shared core competencies.