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Roles and Responsibilities in Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice

Original Editor - Ewa Jaraczewska based on the course by Angela Patterson

Top Contributors - Ewa Jaraczewska and Jess Bell  

Introduction

IPEC core competencies

The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) has identified four core competencies for collaborative practice in healthcare. These competencies provide a framework for developing collaborative capability throughout a professional career, from student training through to clinical practice. These competencies are:[1]

  1. Values and ethics
  2. Roles and responsibilities
  3. Interprofessional communication
  4. Teams and teamwork

These competencies are interconnected and function simultaneously in practice.[2] This article focuses on the role and responsibilities competency.

Roles and Responsibilities Competency

The IPEC roles and responsibilities core competency is defined as using "the knowledge of one's own role and team members' expertise to address individual and population health outcomes."[1]

Each healthcare professional must understand not only their own role, but also those of other professions. Teams that understand and value what each member contributes are better able to assess and address healthcare needs.[3][2][4]

Roles and responsibilities sub-competencies

Roles and Responsibilities Sub-competencies

In the current IPEC framework, the roles and responsibilities competency has five sub-competencies:[1]

  1. Include the full scope of knowledge, skills, and attitudes of team members to provide person-centred, safe, cost-effective, timely, efficient, effective, and equitable care.
  2. Collaborate with others within and outside the health system to improve health outcomes.
  3. Incorporate complementary expertise to meet health needs, including the determinants of health.
  4. Differentiate each team member's role, scope of practice, and responsibility in promoting health outcomes.
  5. Practise cultural humility in interprofessional teamwork.

The following sections explore each sub-competency in detail.

1. Including the Full Scope of Team Members' Expertise

Healthcare systems often deploy professionals below their actual capabilities.[5] For example, physiotherapists may be asked only to advance a patient's mobility,[6] pharmacists may be consulted only about drug interactions, and dietitians may only be called in when someone is already malnourished. Working below actual capability has been linked to job dissatisfaction, missed opportunities for patient care, and higher costs for healthcare organisations.[7]

What does full scope practice actually look like? A physiotherapist working at full scope with, for example, a patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease not only delivers pulmonary rehabilitation exercises, but also assesses functional capacity, activity limitations, fear-avoidance behaviour, posture, sleep position, and leads conversations about lifestyle behaviour change. A pharmacist working at full scope not only checks drug interactions, but can also design simplified medication regimens, identify when non-adherence is actually a literacy issue with pill packaging, schedule medications around meals in a way that supports rather than disrupts daily life, and flag early signs of therapeutic failure.[2]

When team members are not working across their full scope of practice, more professionals may be involved in a patient's care with less impact.[2] To avoid this, every team should have a shared understanding of each member's capabilities, based on an honest appraisal of their knowledge and skills.[8]

2. Collaborating Within and Outside the Health System

A patient's health is shaped by their home, community, workplace, and school, as well as by their family and their culture (i.e., the social determinants of health). Healthcare professionals working exclusively within healthcare settings can only address a fraction of these influences or determinants.[9][10] Clinicians must, therefore, know when and how to reach outside the health system to benefit the patient.[11] For example, a physiotherapist managing a child with developmental coordination disorder may need to liaise with the child's teacher about classroom seating and movement breaks. Similarly, a clinician supporting a patient with chronic low back pain may need to liaise with the patient's employer or occupational health services about workplace modifications.

What happens in a patient's home, workplace, or school frequently determines the effectiveness of the treatment provided within the healthcare setting.[8] This is why collaboration beyond the health system matters.

3. Incorporating Complementary Expertise to Meet Health Needs

The third sub-competency calls for incorporating complementary expertise to ensure health needs are met.[1] Complementary expertise acknowledges that different professions bring distinct perspectives, and that combining this knowledge produces better outcomes than any single profession could achieve alone.[12]

Consider a physiotherapist working with a patient experiencing persistent fatigue. The physiotherapist recognises a possible nutritional component and refers the patient to a dietitian. The dietitian's assessment uncovers food insecurity. Food insecurity has an impact on many aspects of health, including medication adherence, wound healing, chronic disease management, energy for rehabilitation, development, mental health, and more.[2][13][14] Addressing food insecurity meaningfully requires interventions from multiple healthcare professionals, such as:[2]

  • a dietitian who understands budget constraints and cultural food preferences
  • a social worker who knows local food assistance programmes and can navigate eligibility
  • a community health worker the patient trusts and can communicate with
  • a physician who can adjust the treatment plan when adherence is structurally impossible
4. Differentiating Roles, Scopes, and Responsibilities

To effectively differentiate between roles and responsibilities, healthcare professionals need to understand their own role and how it interacts with others.[3] Without this understanding, team members may duplicate assessments, provide patients with conflicting information, or leave tasks unaddressed because each assumes another is responsible.

In a stroke rehabilitation team, for instance, each profession has a primary focus: the physiotherapist leads on mobility and physical function, the occupational therapist on activities of daily living (ADL), the speech and language therapist on communication and swallowing, and the clinical psychologist on psychological adjustment. These roles are distinct, but scopes of practice overlap. For example, a speech and language therapist's work on safe swallowing has direct implications for the dietitian's plan. Where scopes overlap, the team must make active decisions about who leads based on the clinical situation, the patient's needs, and the expertise available.[2]

Role differentiation also includes understanding regulatory and legal boundaries. Some activities fall within one profession's scope of practice, but not another's, and some require specific credentials or certifications. Teams function more effectively when members understand these parameters rather than making assumptions.[2]

5. Practising Cultural Humility in Interprofessional Teams

Cultural humility can act as a self-reflection tool to challenge barriers between service providers and those from diverse backgrounds.[15] In healthcare, it is often considered in terms of patient interactions, and recognises that patients bring different health beliefs, communication preferences, and decision-making frameworks. But this competency applies equally to professional cultures within the team.

Each healthcare profession has developed its own values, language, and approach to clinical problems. A physician, a social worker, a physiotherapist, and an occupational therapist may all assess the same patient but prioritise different aspects of care. It happens not because any of them is wrong, but because each profession brings a distinct clinical lens. These differences in professional perspectives can cause friction within teams, or they can strengthen clinical reasoning, especially if they are approached with humility and curiosity.[2]

Cultural humility in this context means recognising that your professional approach is not the universal standard against which others should be measured. It means being curious about why a colleague from a different discipline sees a patient's situation differently, and treating that difference as valuable information.[16]

Role Clarity and Patient Outcomes

The following clinical scenarios illustrate how role clarity can affect patient outcomes.

Scenario 1:

A 74-year-old woman who lives alone presents to the emergency department with dizziness. She has type 2 diabetes and takes several medications. She is assessed, prescribed medication for dizziness and discharged home. There is no comprehensive interprofessional team review as the patient is independent and appears to be managing well. Three days later, the patient is readmitted after a fall.

Had an interprofessional approach been taken at the initial presentation, a physiotherapist could have assessed her fall risk and provided targeted advice, education, or exercises to manage her dizziness. An occupational therapist could have provided fall prevention education and identified simple home modifications. A community nurse could have monitored her symptoms and medication management after discharge. This coordinated response could have reduced the patient's fall risk.

Scenario 2:

Consider an interprofessional team working with a family group who have resettled as refugees. The mother has poorly controlled diabetes and depression. Her two children have unaddressed developmental delays. The family faces language barriers, resettlement challenges, and food insecurity.

The team includes a family medicine physician, nurse care coordinator, pharmacist, social worker, dietitian, speech and language therapist, and a community health worker who speaks the family's language and shares their cultural background.

The pharmacist works at full scope by creating a simplified medication regimen tailored to the family's daily structure, rather than a standard protocol. The dietitian seeks to understand the family's food preferences and budget realities before providing nutritional advice. The social worker works across sectors to coordinate immigration support, housing stability, and mental health treatment. The speech and language therapist coordinates with the children's schools to address their developmental needs. The physician manages diagnosis and prescribing. The nurse care coordinator ensures information flows and that the family can navigate the system.

Team members must recognise that their assumptions about family structure, health beliefs, health-seeking behaviour, and communication may not apply. In this scenario, they turn to the community health worker rather than defaulting to their own training.

Reflection

Most clinicians already operate within a version of this framework, even if their team has never named it. The roles and responsibilities competency prompts clinicians to ask:

  • Do you understand the full scope of your colleagues' expertise?
  • Do your colleagues understand the full scope of yours?
  • Are there unaddressed gaps in your team's care coverage?

Uncertainty in any of these areas is a starting point for reflection and development.

Summary

The roles and responsibilities competency requires healthcare professionals to understand their own role and those of their colleagues, to use the full scope of each team member's expertise, to collaborate within and beyond the health system, and to approach professional differences with cultural humility. This competency is developed in practice through interprofessional teamwork.

Resources

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 IPEC Core Competencies For Interprofessional Collaborative Practice: Version 3. (2023). Available from https://ipec.memberclicks.net/assets/core-competencies/IPEC_Core_Competencies_Version_3_2023.pdf [last accessed 14.4.2026]
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Patterson A. Roles and Responsibilities in Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice Course. Physiopedia Plus, 2026.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Fahs I, Akel M, Haddad C, Sacre H, Hajj A, Zeenny RM, Iskandar K, Salameh P. Working together for patient health: Assessing interprofessional competencies among healthcare professionals in Lebanon. Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice. 2023 Sep 1;32:100630.
  4. ↑ Dib K, Belrhiti Z. Unpacking the black box of interprofessional collaboration within healthcare networks: a scoping review. BMJ Open. 2025; 15 (6): e101702 [Internet].
  5. ↑ Rosen MA, DiazGranados D, Dietz AS, Benishek LE, Thompson D, Pronovost PJ, Weaver SJ. Teamwork in healthcare: Key discoveries enabling safer, high-quality care. Am Psychol. 2018 May-Jun;73(4):433-450.
  6. ↑ Champoux M, Poirier A, Hudon C. Roles of physiotherapists in primary care teams: a scoping review. BMJ Open. 2025 Feb 1;15(2):e092276.
  7. ↑ Lambert LK, Havaei F, Beck SM, Ma A, Larmet J, Kaur J, Adhami N, Le D, Woods R. An early evaluation of team consistency and scope optimization in team-based cancer care. BMC Cancer. 2025 Feb 28;25(1):371.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 MacDonald MB, Bally JM, Ferguson LM, Murray BL, Fowler-Kerry SE, Anonson JM. Knowledge of the professional role of others: A key interprofessional competency. Nurse education in practice. 2010 Jul 1;10(4):238-42.
  9. ↑ Hancock T. Beyond health care: the other determinants of health. CMAJ. 2017 Dec 18;189(50):E1571.
  10. ↑ Glenn J, Kleinhenz G, Smith JMS, Chaney RA, Moxley VBA, Donoso Naranjo PG, Stone S, Hanson CL, Redelfs AH, Novilla MLB. Do healthcare providers consider the social determinants of health? Results from a nationwide cross-sectional study in the United States. BMC Health Serv Res. 2024 Mar 4;24(1):271.
  11. ↑ Bernabeo E, Holmboe ES. Patients, providers, and systems need to acquire a specific set of competencies to achieve truly patient-centered care. Health Affairs. 2013 Feb 1;32(2):250-8.
  12. ↑ Pype P, Mertens F, Helewaut F, Krystallidou D. Healthcare teams as complex adaptive systems: understanding team behaviour through team members' perception of interpersonal interaction. BMC Health Serv Res. 2018 Jul 20;18(1):570.
  13. ↑ Rosas LG, Chen S, Xiao L, Emmert-Aronson BO, Chen WT, Ng E, et al. Addressing food insecurity and chronic conditions in community health centres: protocol of a quasi-experimental evaluation of Recipe4Health. BMJ Open. 2023 Apr 6;13(4):e068585.
  14. ↑ Mishra KG, Patnaik N, Harshitha B, Mohandas A, Roy A, Patnaik S. Food insecurity: A formidable barrier to medication adherence in a vulnerable population with chronic diseases. Clinical Epidemiology and Global Health. 2025;33:102033.
  15. ↑ Konidaris M, Petrakis M. Cultural humility training in mental health service provision: A scoping review of the foundational and conceptual literature. InHealthcare 2025 Jun 4 (Vol. 13, No. 11, p. 1342). MDPI.
  16. ↑ Kokorelias KM, Wu V, Colquhoun H, Sangrar R, Wijekoon S, Nelson ML, Assaf H, Ramachandran M, Singh H. Cultural humility practices in occupational therapy services: A scoping review. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy. 2025 Mar 1;79(2):7902180080.
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