Interprofessional Education Evidence for Pharmacy Accreditation

You’ve probably lived this one. The visiting team’s first day ends with a question nobody in the room was dreading: “Walk us through your interprofessional program.” And suddenly the answer is scattered across a simulation center’s scheduling system, a joint course you share with nursing, a hospital rotation where collaboration clearly happened but nobody wrote it down, and a strategic plan that mentions teamwork exactly once.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is one of those program elements that every standard requires, every curriculum committee believes in, and almost no program can produce as a coherent file on demand. That’s fixable — but only if you know exactly what the standard is asking you to show. This post walks through what CCAPP [1] and ACPE [2] actually expect for IPE in a PharmD program, and how to build the evidence file so that question becomes a two-minute answer instead of a two-hour scramble.

What Both Frameworks Agree On

In pharmacy, IPE isn’t a soft add-on; it’s anchored in what graduates are expected to do. The AFPC Educational Outcomes (the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada) [3] organize graduate capability into role statements — Care Provider (the core of the discipline), Communicator, Collaborator, Leader-Manager, Health Advocate, Scholar, and Professional. The Collaborator role states that graduates “work collaboratively with patients and intra- and inter-professional teams to provide safe, effective, efficient health care,” with key competencies CL1 (work effectively with members of the health team, including patients, pharmacy colleagues and individuals from other professions) and CL2 (hand over the care of a patient to other pharmacy team members and non-pharmacy team members to facilitate continuity of safe patient care). The AFPC outcomes are supported by a user manual that includes a crosswalk to the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (CIHC) National Interprofessional Competency Framework [3] — so Canadian programs may be mapping to two interprofessional vocabularies at once.

On the US side, the ACPE Standards 2025 put collaboration in the preamble itself: alongside APPE-readiness and practice-readiness, students and graduates are expected to be “team-ready,” meaning able to contribute as a member of an interprofessional collaborative patient care team [2]. On the US side, the shared vocabulary for what “collaborate” means in practice is the IPEC Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice (Version 3, 2023), organized into four competency areas — Values and Ethics, Roles and Responsibilities, Communication, and Teams and Teamwork [4]. ACPE says so in its IPE key element: IPE activities should be guided by the IPEC competencies [2].

So the question at a visit is never “do you do interprofessional education?” It’s “show me that it’s intentional, integrated, assessed, and supported.” Here’s what each accreditor asks for.

Trainee practicing clinical skills during hands-on skills training

What CCAPP Asks You to Show

CCAPP’s expectations are spread across three standards, and the third one is the one coordinators miss. Standard 2 requires that the curriculum “includes a series of core courses, practice experiences, and interprofessional experiences that are designed to support students’ growth toward meeting the program’s educational outcomes.” [1] Criterion 2.1 asks you to map intended educational outcomes to courses — and lists as an example of evidence that might be considered a description of how all program courses, including practice experiences and interprofessional experiences, “integrate and build on one another” [1]. Standard 3 then requires that the core curriculum itself include content in intra- and inter-professional collaborative practice [1]. So IPE has to appear in the curriculum map, not just in a separate document.

Standard 5 is where the real work is. It requires learning experiences throughout the program that enable a graduate to collaborate effectively with other pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, other healthcare professionals, patients, and families — and it requires that intra- and interprofessional learning and collaborative practice be “included in the policies and strategic plan of the Faculty and supported by the Faculty and the University” [1]. Note the second half: the standard isn’t satisfied by activities alone; the institution has to show it backs them.

The evidence lists under Standard 5 are unusually specific, which is good news for you — they’re a ready-made checklist. Only the first item below is listed as evidence to be submitted; the rest are examples the standard says might be considered, but they are worth assembling anyway:

Criterion 5.1 (activities and integration): the evidence to be submitted is a description of activities in which pharmacy students interact with and collaborate with pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, pharmacy technician students, and students and practitioners from other health professions “including medicine and nursing.” As examples of what might be considered, the standard also names content areas an IPE framework could cover — communication with patients and other healthcare professionals, teamwork, group dynamics, problem solving, negotiation, collaborative leadership, role clarification, and conflict resolution — and evidence that the IPE curriculum is integrated throughout the program, including experiential training, plus feedback from students, faculty, and preceptors on those activities as they relate to expected competencies, outcomes, and key performance indicators [1].
Criterion 5.2 (institutional support): evidence that organizational structures, resources, and processes are in place to support intra- and interprofessional learning, with support for IPE and its recognition as a valued teaching activity given as an example of further evidence [1].

A description of student-led interprofessional activities is also listed as an example under the professional-culture criterion (7.3) [1] — if your students run joint events with other programs, that belongs in the file.

Clinician talking with a patient in a hospital room

What ACPE Asks You to Show

ACPE’s requirements live in two places: the educational outcomes and the experiential curriculum. Standard 2.1.h, “Interprofessional collaboration (Collaborator),” requires that the graduate be able to actively engage and contribute as a healthcare team member by demonstrating core interprofessional competencies [2]. That’s the outcome statement; the curriculum has to demonstrate it.

Standard 2.3 [2] is the IPE standard, with two key elements. 2.3.a (interprofessional team education): the didactic and experiential curricula must include opportunities for students to learn about, from, and with other members of the interprofessional healthcare team, so that students gain an understanding of the abilities, competencies, and scope of practice of team members. Some activities may be simulations; activities should be guided by the IPEC competencies. 2.3.b (interprofessional team practice): all students participate as a healthcare team member in providing patient care and contributing to therapeutic decision-making, working with a variety of types of prescribers and their students as well as other professional healthcare team members and their students.

The experiential standards pull IPE forward again. Standard 3.1.a requires that IPPEs involve common contemporary U.S. practice models, including interprofessional practice involving shared patient care decision-making, and Standard 3.2.d requires that the majority of required APPEs involve interprofessional communication and collaboration [2].

One thing worth noticing: the IPE key elements (2.3.a and 2.3.b) set no hour minimum for IPE itself; the standards’ hour requirements attach to IPPE and APPE duration (3.1.b, 3.2.b). The requirement is about participation, integration, and team-based decision-making — which means the weight of the standard falls on documentation, not on a clock. If your APPE sites are delivering interprofessional practice but your preceptor evaluations never mention it, you can’t prove 3.2.d is met.

Where IPE Evidence Goes Missing

Because IPE is inherently joint, its evidence is inherently scattered. The joint course with nursing lives in the partner faculty’s records. The simulation runs live in the simulation center. The collaboration that happens during an APPE lives in a preceptor evaluation that was written to assess other things. The strategic plan language lives in a governance document nobody has opened since it was adopted. When the visiting team asks for your IPE program, you’re assembling it from four systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

The gap patterns are remarkably consistent. IPE is concentrated in one year and thin elsewhere — a problem, because both standards ask for integration throughout the program, didactic and experiential. There’s no assessment tied to IPE activities, so you can show that students attended but not that they learned. Feedback from students, faculty, and preceptors on IPE activities was never collected — even though CCAPP lists it as an example of evidence to consider. And institutional support is asserted in the self-study narrative without the underlying policy or strategic plan language attached.

Documents and pen on a desk — assembling the evidence file

Building the IPE Evidence File

None of this requires a new program. It requires a file that assembles what you already do. Here’s a practical order of operations:

Inventory every IPE activity by year of study. Joint courses, shared simulations, co-taught content, joint clinical placements, student-led interprofessional events, co-curricular activities. One row per activity: what it is, who the other profession is, which year it appears in, and how often it runs. This single inventory answers most of the “walk us through your IPE program” question and exposes the thin years.
Map each activity to the standard it satisfies. CCAPP Standards 2, 3, and 5 (criteria 2.1, 5.1, 5.2); ACPE 2.1.h, 2.3.a, 2.3.b, 3.1.a, 3.2.d; AFPC CL1 and CL2; and, where useful, the four IPEC competency areas. An activity that can’t be mapped to anything is a description, not evidence.
Attach an assessment to each activity. Rubrics, simulation evaluations, joint work products, preceptor feedback specifically about collaboration. This is the difference between showing attendance and showing learning — and it’s what the Criterion 5.1 language about expected competencies, outcomes, and key performance indicators is really pointing at.
Capture the feedback loop. Student, faculty, and preceptor feedback on IPE activities, collected on a schedule rather than at visit time. If you don’t already ask preceptors about interprofessional collaboration during APPEs, that’s a one-line change to an existing evaluation form.
Pull the institutional support evidence. The strategic plan language, faculty policies, and the structures and resources (staff time, simulation space, partnership agreements) that CCAPP Criterion 5.2 asks about. Screenshot or excerpt them into the file so the self-study narrative can cite them directly.
Check continuity, then close the gaps. Look at the year-by-year inventory against the “integrated throughout” requirement. Gaps show up here — a second year with no IPE, an APPE track where interprofessional practice isn’t documented — and they’re cheap to fix a year before a visit and expensive to fix during one.

What this file gives you is the same thing the standards are really asking for: proof that collaboration is a designed, assessed, institutionally supported part of the program — not a series of well-meaning activities that happened to involve other students. In MapOutcomes, that’s exactly what the evidence map does: every IPE activity links to the standard and competency it satisfies, each assessment and feedback artifact attaches to its activity, gaps surface automatically when a criterion has nothing behind it, and the self-study section exports with the citations already in place.

References

Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs, "Accreditation Standards for Canadian Educational Programs Leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) Degree," CCAPP, 2023 Revised. [Online]. Available: https://ccapp.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/April10-2025_CCAPP-PharmD-Standards_ENG.pdf
Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education, "Accreditation Standards and Key Elements for the Professional Program in Pharmacy Leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy Degree (Standards 2025)," ACPE, updated June 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.acpe-accredit.org/wp-content/uploads/ACPEStandards2025.pdf
Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada, "Educational Outcomes for First Professional Degree Programs in Pharmacy in Canada: Executive Summary," AFPC, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.afpcpharmacy.ca/_files/ugd/3b5d85_cfc2090b0a6a4bc2873e5361c6d0701e.pdf
Interprofessional Education Collaborative, "IPEC Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice: Version 3," IPEC, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.ipecollaborative.org/assets/core-competencies/IPEC_Core_Competencies_Version_3_2023.pdf

Interprofessional Education Evidence for Pharmacy Accreditation: What CCAPP and ACPE Expect