An interprofessional collaboration paper is not a story about a team that worked well together. It is an analysis of a real experience against a real competency framework. This guide covers the IPEC domains, how to analyze rather than narrate, and the barriers worth naming honestly.
An interprofessional collaboration paper, sometimes labelled an IPE paper for interprofessional education, asks you to reflect on or analyze collaborative practice between nursing and one or more other health professions, such as medicine, pharmacy, social work, physical therapy, occupational therapy or nutrition. Most assignments tie this to a specific experience: a clinical placement, a simulation exercise, a team-based learning activity, or a case conference you observed or took part in. The prompt is rarely asking you to argue in the abstract that teamwork matters. It is asking you to examine a real interaction closely enough to say something specific about how interprofessional collaboration actually functioned, or failed to function, in that moment.
Before you draft anything, reread the prompt for what kind of experience it expects you to draw on. Some assignments require a documented simulation with assigned roles, others allow any real clinical observation, and some ask you to analyze a hypothetical or provided case scenario instead. The analytical expectations described in this guide apply to all three, but the source of your example will differ.
Interprofessional education has become an increasingly emphasized part of nursing curricula in recent years, partly because nursing accreditation and professional bodies have placed growing weight on preparing students to function well on the collaborative, multi-disciplinary teams that define most modern healthcare settings. Your assignment sits inside that broader shift, so it helps to treat it as more than a one-off writing exercise. The analytical habits it asks you to practice, noticing role clarity, communication patterns and team dynamics in the moment, are ones you will keep using informally throughout your clinical career, long after this particular paper is graded and filed away.
The Interprofessional Education Collaborative, commonly abbreviated IPEC, publishes a set of core competency domains that are widely referenced across health professions education, including nursing. Knowing these domains by name and using them accurately gives your analysis a real structure instead of vague praise or criticism. The four domains, in the form most commonly taught, are:
| Domain | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Values and ethics for interprofessional practice | Working with individuals of other professions while maintaining mutual respect and shared values, and placing the patient's interests at the center of collaborative work. |
| Roles and responsibilities | Using the knowledge of your own role and the roles of other professions appropriately, to assess and address the needs of the patients and populations served. |
| Interprofessional communication | Communicating with patients, families, communities and other health professionals in a responsive and responsible manner that supports a team approach to care. |
| Teams and teamwork | Applying relationship-building values and team dynamics principles to perform effectively in different team roles to plan and deliver safe, timely, efficient and equitable care. |
These domain names and their exact wording may be summarized or updated across editions of the IPEC source material, so if your assignment requires a direct citation of the competencies, confirm the current wording and edition against the original IPEC publication rather than quoting a secondary source from memory.
The single biggest difference between a mediocre IPE paper and a strong one is analysis versus narration. A narrative account describes what happened: who was in the room, what was said, what was decided. An analytical account does that briefly and then asks why it happened that way, using the competency framework as the lens. Both are needed, but analysis is where the marks are concentrated.
A single well-analyzed moment, examined in this much depth, is worth far more to your grade than five moments each described in a single surface-level sentence.
To see the difference in practice, compare two versions of the same observation. A vague, under-analyzed version might read: "The team communicated well during rounds." A stronger, analytical version might read: "During interdisciplinary rounds, the pharmacist raised a concern about a potential drug interaction using a direct, specific question addressed to the attending physician, who acknowledged the concern and adjusted the order in response. This reflects effective application of the interprofessional communication domain, because the concern was raised through an appropriate channel, addressed directly to the team member with prescribing authority, and was acted upon rather than deferred." Notice that the second version names the specific professions involved by role, describes the concrete action taken, and explicitly ties it back to a named competency domain, rather than offering a general impression.
Two real, frequently taught frameworks are worth knowing by name if your paper discusses interprofessional communication specifically, since naming and applying one accurately adds concrete substance to your analysis instead of general impressions. SBAR, standing for Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation, is a structured communication tool widely used for handoffs and urgent updates between team members, designed to convey critical information in a predictable order so the receiving clinician does not have to guess what matters most. TeamSTEPPS, developed by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in partnership with the Department of Defense, is a broader evidence-based framework for improving teamwork and communication in healthcare settings, built around core skill areas that typically include leadership, situation monitoring, mutual support and communication.
If your observed experience involved a handoff, a call for help, or a structured huddle, naming the specific tool that was used, or noting the absence of one where a structured tool might have helped, gives your analysis a concrete anchor rather than a general impression of "the communication was good" or "the communication broke down." As with the IPEC competencies, confirm the current framework details against the original source if your assignment requires a direct citation, since program materials sometimes summarize these frameworks slightly differently.
If your paper is based on an interprofessional simulation rather than a live clinical placement, treat the structured debrief that typically follows a simulation as a primary source of material for your analysis, not just the simulation scenario itself. Debriefs are usually where a facilitator draws out exactly the kind of reflection this assignment wants: what each role noticed, where communication succeeded or broke down, and what the team would do differently next time. If you took notes during debrief, or can recall specific points raised by facilitators or teammates from other professions, this material often makes stronger evidence than your own in-scenario perceptions alone, since the debrief format is designed to surface exactly the competency-related insights your paper needs.
Where your program provided a structured simulation evaluation tool or checklist, referencing specific items from it, without simply reproducing the whole form in your paper, can also strengthen your analysis by tying it to a standard your program already uses and expects you to be familiar with.
If your assignment invites discussion of challenges or barriers, these are genuine, frequently documented issues worth considering when they are relevant to your actual experience. Only include a barrier if you can tie it to something specific you observed; listing barriers in the abstract without evidence weakens the paper.
Identifying a barrier is only half the analytical work. For every barrier you discuss, push yourself to state what a team, a system, or you personally could realistically do about it. A hierarchy-related barrier, for instance, where a student felt unable to question a decision made by a more senior team member, could lead to a recommendation about using a structured tool such as SBAR precisely because its standardized format gives a lower-status team member a legitimate, expected script for raising a concern, rather than requiring them to interrupt informally. A recommendation like this, which explains the mechanism by which the fix would address the particular barrier you identified, reads as far more thoughtful than a general statement that "teams should communicate better" or "hierarchy should be reduced."
This structure works because it forces the reader through your evidence and your reasoning in a predictable order, mirroring the same logic the IPEC domains themselves are built around: values, roles, communication and teamwork are separable enough to analyze one at a time, even though a real interaction usually involves more than one at once.
One well-analyzed moment beats five described ones. Depth of analysis against a named competency domain is what this assignment is actually grading, not the number of examples you include.
Share your experience or scenario, the rubric and your competency framework in your brief and get a model paper built around real analysis.
When you write about a real clinical experience involving real colleagues, patients or team members, use de-identified, respectful language throughout, exactly as you would in a clinical journal or case study. Refer to people by role rather than name ("the attending physician," "the charge nurse," "the physical therapist on the team"), avoid identifying details about the patient or facility, and describe difficult moments factually rather than in a way that reads as a personal complaint about a specific colleague. This protects confidentiality and keeps the paper's tone appropriately professional and analytical rather than anecdotal or critical of named individuals.
This standard applies even when a specific interaction reflects poorly on how a moment was handled. It is possible, and usually stronger academically, to describe a genuine breakdown, such as a concern that was raised but not acted on, factually and analytically ("the concern was not escalated further at that point") without assigning blame to a named or identifiable individual. Your program's confidentiality expectations for clinical writing, typically covered in your handbook alongside HIPAA-related guidance, apply to reflective and analytical papers exactly as they apply to clinical documentation, so treat this section as a requirement rather than a stylistic preference.
Write about it honestly and analytically. A paper that examines a genuine breakdown in collaboration, using the competency framework to explain what went wrong and what should change, often demonstrates stronger critical thinking than one describing a smooth, uneventful interaction.
Follow your program's rubric and citation requirements. If a direct citation is expected, reference the current edition of the IPEC core competencies publication and format it per your required style, such as the guidance in our APA 7 guide.
Yes, if your assignment allows it. Simulations are a common and accepted source for this kind of paper, since they let students observe team dynamics and roles directly, often with time afterward for structured debrief and reflection.
Cover the domains that are genuinely relevant to your specific experience rather than forcing all four into equal treatment. A paper analyzing a communication breakdown, for example, may reasonably spend most of its depth on the communication and teamwork domains.
You can still write a strong analysis. Observing a handoff, a rounding team, or a case conference gives you the same raw material for competency-based analysis as active participation, and being an observer can actually make it easier to notice team dynamics you might otherwise miss while occupied with your own tasks.
A brief, professional reflection on what surprised you or what you personally take from the experience is usually welcome and sometimes explicitly requested, but keep it in proportion to the rest of the paper. It should support your competency-based analysis, not replace it.
The habits this assignment asks you to practice, noticing a specific moment, naming the competency or communication tool it relates to, and stating a concrete recommendation, are the same habits that make a genuinely effective team member on a real unit. A strong interprofessional collaboration paper treats a real team experience as evidence to be analyzed against a named framework, not a story to be told. For related assignments on team dynamics and professional practice, see our nursing leadership and management guide, and for the reflective writing skills this assignment also draws on, see the nursing reflective essay guide.
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