Competence Equals Resilience: Interprofessional Competency as a Strategy for Building Team Resilience

What comes to mind when you hear the word “resilience”? Resiliency is often referenced as an individual quality. However, resilience is a spectrum beyond self care and wellness apps. It can be used to describe a collective group. The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) defines resiliency as “the ability of an individual, team, organization, community and/or system to withstand, adapt, recover, rebound, or grow from adversity, stress, and/or trauma.”1 Competency in interprofessional skills is a pathway towards fostering collective resilience. As public health and healthcare professionals, building interpersonal skills not only contributes to better outcomes for the communities we serve but can also protect us from burnout.

Several hands of diverse skin tones stacked on top of one another, symbolizing interprofessional unity

IPEC Core Competencies as a Roadmap to Collective Resiliency

The IPEC has four core competencies for interprofessionalism: values and ethics, roles/responsibilities, communication, and teams and teamwork.1 Below we’ll highlight how each competency fosters interprofessional resilience.

1. Values and Ethics

Moral injury happens when there's persistent threat that betrays the core values and ethics to one’s professional identity.2 Associated feelings can include guilt, frustration, and helplessness. This IPEC competency highlights a climate of shared values, ethical conduct, and mutual respect among all team members.1 A culture of shared values and ethics prevents a single team member or profession from having to bear the individual weight of assaults against professional identity. Ideally, each team member feels empowered to advocate for what they need in a team culture that shares the value of supporting all team members across professions. 

2. Roles and Responsibilities

The roles and responsibilities of each team member and the ability for each professions’ expertise to be included is crucial to interprofessional work. In stressful settings, unclear expectations can lead to frustration, duplication of work, and burnout. Role clarity and confidence allows team members to know when to step in, when to ask for help, and how to use each person’s strengths. Understanding one's role and responsibility in any given interprofessional context allows for better collaboration and eliminates working in silos. 

3. Communication

IPEC emphasizes compassionate, responsive, respectful, and responsible communication in teams.1 When all team members across professions feel they are able to speak up and are heard in doing so, then their professional voice is reinforced. An intact professional voice protects against burnout. When the team’s communication collectively makes space for all team members, it builds trust and collective resilience. An example of this is avoiding discipline-specific terminology in favor of more inclusive communication that makes room for shared understanding across professions. 

4. Teams and Teamwork

This IPEC competency highlights the importance of team accountability, communication and collaboration.1 Resilient teams are defined by their ability to adapt, hold each other accountable, and know that challenges aren't carried alone. They are a cohesive unit, unfathomed by ever-changing conditions. Team resilience is an essential skill in healthcare, given the fast paced environment and high demands. Resilient team members are grounded in trust, open communication and common purpose. This doesn't mean that resilient teams don't experience stress; rather, they have mutual confidence in their team members to aid in stressful situations and get through it together.

Strategies to Build Collective Resilience:

  1. Establish shared values and ethics, and regularly reinforce them in daily work.
  2. Regularly practice gratitude for the diverse expertise of each team member.
  3. Conduct daily team check ins to ask questions like “Who is overwhelmed? Who has extra capacity?”
  4. Remember that an individual team member is not the team, and that the responsibility of the work is shared among all interprofessional team members.

References

  1. Interprofessional Education Collaborative. (2023). IPEC core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: Version 3. https://ipec.memberclicks.net/assets/core-competencies/IPEC_Core_Competencies_Version_3_2023.pdf
  2. Dean, W., Morris, D., Manzur, M. K., & Talbot, S. (2024). Moral injury in health care: A unified definition and its relationship to burnout. Federal Practitioner, 41(4), 104–107. https://doi.org/10.12788/fp.0467