Interprofessional education in undergraduate courses in health in Brazil: integrative review

This integrative review aimed to synthesize the evidence regarding interprofessional education (IPE) in undergraduate health courses in Brazil. This article included original articles published between 2005 and 2020 addressing IPE in undergraduate health courses in Brazilian higher education institutions. Our search captured 333 articles in Medline, PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase (Elsevier), Web Of Science (Main Collection), Scopus (Elsevier), Science Direct (Elsevier), ERIC, and LILACS via BVS. After applying the exclusion and inclusion criteria, the study corpus covered 34 original manuscripts. It was identified that a network is developed at the national level, and with international support, supports discussions and research on IPE. However, there is a concentration of partnerships between researchers from the Northeast, Southeast and South regions, with the need to expand studies on the country's experiences in the North and Midwest regions. There is also consistent publication of experiences concerning the implementation of IPE in undergraduate healthcare courses in Brazil. However, the uniprofessional characteristics and the lack of uniformity in the curricula are still significant, which represent essential obstacles to further IPE strengthening in Brazil. In the Brazilian literature, there is a dearth of longitudinal studies and mixed methods that assess changes in organizational practices. There remains a need for IPE studies with more rigorous designs to generate more impactful evidence.