There is a new kid on the block in the international arena of Interprofessional Education (IPE). The African Interprofessional Education Network (AfrIPEN) was formally accepted as a member of the IPE World Coordinating Committee at the All Together Better Health VIII Congress held during September in Oxford in the United Kingdom.

The goal with AfrIPEN is to advance IPE in Sub-Saharan Africa and to promote and share good practice in IPE. Partners also collaborate to identify, develop, adapt and share IPE curricula for the African context.

A core competency in IPE is collaborative leadership. "It is important that education for health professionals is transformed. We cannot continue to model an outdated biomedical approach with different health professions practicing in silos. We need a major paradigm shift towards an interprofessional person-centred model with a bio-psycho-social-spiritual approach," says Dr Stefanus Snyman.

Snyman is the manager of the Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice initiative in the Centre for Health Professions Education at Stellenbosch University's (SU) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS). "We need to identify and promote IPE values that engender teamwork in interprofessional settings."

"The SU is recognised as one of the leaders in the field of IPE in Africa. We are currently investigating how we can develop and share training material that can be applied in the African context," explains Snyman. "IPE and community-based education are also relatively new concepts and we are collaborating to develop policies to help facilitate the necessary change."

Snyman, a specialist in consensus-based partnership development and facilitation, played an instrumental role in the founding of AfriPEN. "I have been facilitating, exploring and building relationships with IPE partners in Africa for four years," Snyman says. "When we decided to establish AfrIPEN in June 2015 at the Towards Unity for Health conference in Johannesburg in South Africa, we were a family consisting of 57 IPE experts from 10 countries."

Snyman was asked to introduce AfrIPEN at the congress in Oxford, where the partnership development project created a lot of interest. "The international networks are not familiar with the concept of building relationships between partner institutions. They operate differently, with a more corporate management style," says Snyman.