´óÏó´«Ã½

In January 2025, the IP-future project was launched with a kick-off meeting bringing together the core team with members from the University of Bergen, the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, UiT The arctic university of Norway and Hanze University of Applied Sciences (Groningen, the Netherlands).  

The IP-future project has received over €1 million (12 million NOK) in funding from the Research Council of Norway, underscoring the importance and impact of this work. The project’s mission is to build a better, more inclusive, and sustainable future through education, research, and interprofessional collaboration. 

The core team includes (photo: from left to right) incoming project PhD candidate Håvard Stensletten Eik, WP1 lead and deputy head in TVEPS Merethe Hustoft, partner Anita Iversen from Tromsø, PI and WP2 lead and head of TVEPS Ane Johannessen, WP3 head Reidar Jakobsen from department of clinical psychology (UiB), partner Jan-Jaap Reinders from Groningen and project- and TVEPS- coordinator Gunhild Agdesteen.

The kick-off meeting was not only a valuable introduction to the core team but also led to major progress, including the planning of international annual meetings through 2028, and the start of theoretical underpinning of the research tasks ahead.  

A mix of qualitative and quantitative methods will be employed in IP-future. As the core team has experience mainly from quantitative methods, associate professor Anita Iversen from the University of Tromsø shared her qualitative competence from earlier IPE research projects with the core team. On the quantitative side, on the other hand, Dr. Jan-Jaap Reinders gave a presentation on interprofessional identity development, supported by the EPIT (Extended Professional Identity Theory), a theory developed and first tested in Groningen, The Netherlands. EPIT provides a framework for understanding and fostering interprofessional identity, enabling (future) professionals to better integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines. The interprofessional extension of EPIT will be used as a tool together with the Interprofessional Collaboration Competencies Attainment Survey (ICCAS, which is already in use in TVEPS) to shed light on the development of interprofessional identity and competencies through interprofessional collaboration learning in real-life workplace arenas. This is one of three work packages in IP-future, with the other work packages covering predictors for learning and end-user value of interprofessional collaboration.  

With the kick-off meeting completed and project infrastructure set up, everything is now in place for a successful collaboration in IP-future, linking together research, education and interprofessional practice.