Click to view the webcast of this presentantion.

Using a case-study approach, participants will explore an example course development activity and the results of a pilot implementation. After discussing common barriers and constraints, participants will work in small groups to address key issues organized around targeted questions and generate an action plan to expand an interprofessional curriculum.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

Health Canada has identified interprofessional collaboration in patient-centred care as an effective means of improving the health care of Canadians. This approach is an integral component of the Pan-Canadian strategy to improve healthcare for Canadians. Although some practice settings utilize strong teamwork and collaborative skills to provide care for clients, many institutions and healthcare agencies have not yet attained this goal. Health care professionals must learn these collaborative skills and perceive institutional valuing of this way of providing care to clients. Because interprofessional collaboration and teamwork must begin in professional educational programs, many health sciences programs have initiated interprofessional education for their students.

One of the challenges faculty experience in interprofessional educational experiences is the lack of specificity in the competencies of interprofessional practice. General competencies such as teamwork, leadership, communication skills, negotiation and conflict resolution, knowledge of the other professions, and knowledge of one’s own profession are enunciated in the literature. A challenge for educators, and subsequently for clinical educators in practice, is the delineation of the actual competencies needed for interprofessional practice. The authors report on a study in which they interviewed 28 practitioners, faculty, and students in interprofessional practice to develop a comprehensive listing of the competencies and associated behaviours of interprofessional practice. The presenters will engage participants in a discussion of these competencies and behaviours, and the implications for practice settings, both in terms of student learning and the professional practice. Participants will be asked to provide feedback on the identified competencies, and engaged in a process of leveling of competencies for health sciences professional students. Preparation of clinical preceptors and students for interprofessional practice, and evaluative criteria for professional practice will be examined. Means of creating or supporting teamwork and collaborative practice in a variety of settings will be considered, especially in terms of limited opportunities for all students to engage in interprofessional practice and develop the necessary competencies.

A basic, yet descriptive overview of what needs to be considered when launching a successful IPHC course will be shared. This includes: sample documents, factors at the task force and course development levels, tips, and tools that make for a successful course.

In the area of research, the UND course was developed based on exploring existing literature and IPHC programs. Although the development of the evaluation component was time consuming due in part to the differences among the disciplines in how student assessment should be conducted, the tools have evolved in time. Feedback from students and facilitators has been instrumental in further development of the course. These strategies include written and clinical exams, practical application activities, reaction papers, journas, surveys and class discussions.

The course is modeled after the Patient Centered Learning (PCL) curriculum of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences where small group learning sessions facilitate the integration of the basic sciences with clinically relevant cases. The instructors come from all of the represented disciplines and each instructor is trained in the PCL approach to facilitate the team of student learners who discern and create specific learning objectives as the case is discussed. During the six week, one credit course, students’ learning centers on discussion and problem solving for two case studies specifically designed to meet the objectives for this course.

Outcomes for each six week session for the past year have been collected, analyzed, and tracked. The results are utilized for course improvements.

Lessons learned include: facilitators for this course need to be actively engaged in the discussions as compared to the Medical School model; reducing out of class time for learning objectives due to it being one credit; adding more hands on activities for students and “get to know” you activities at the beginning of each night; being flexible to changing times for the course in order to accommodate additional disciplines and departmental curriculum changes; and how the course development team itself needed to model team work in order for the course to continue.

Rationale: Collaborative patient centred practice has shown to be effective in achieving improved health outcomes and enhanced human health resource management. Developing inter-professional practice educational models will therefore ensure that health providers gain the necessary knowledge to work effectively in inter-professional teams and the practice skills to succeed within the evolving health care system. PBL-in-Action, also known as ‘Clinical PBL’, is an innovative educational model in which real patients, rather than contrived cases, are the focus for PBL; and is applied in the ambulatory primary care setting.

Objectives: To describe the development, implementation plan, and evaluation framework of PBL-in-Action.

Methods: Following a literature review and an environmental scan of existing clinical PBL initiatives, the PBL-in-Action educational model and evaluation framework were developed. In 2007 the UBC Health Clinic will pilot PBL-in-Action. Student attitude surveys, patient satisfaction surveys, and student, staff and faculty focus groups will be used to measure the impact on inter-professional learning. Patient health outcomes will also be evaluated.

Results: The educational model outline, implementation plan, and evaluation framework will be presented.

Discussion: The way we educate health providers is a key component to achieving system change for sustainable health care delivery.

We expect that this innovative inter-professional PBL-in-Action educational model will equally benefit both the students and the patients in the UBC community.

Using scenarios provided, participants will develop a beginning-level interprofessional course for their educational institutions. Course content, instructional techniques, successes and challenges of an existing large interprofessional class at the university level will be presented. Examples of teaching/learning activities including participation in interprofessional teams will be given.

The tough questions we will address in this session are:

1. Research, theory: What is the research supporting an interprofessional course for beginning-level students? What are the theoretical underpinnings of team theory and application?

2. Learning, teaching, and practice methodologies: How do we best teach the concepts and skills needed for interprofessional practice? What are some of those concepts and skills? How do we best teach these concepts and skills to students beginning our professional programs? How do we teach concepts to potentially large groups of students?

3. Outcomes and assessment: What are the outcomes of interprofessional education at an early stage of the students’ education? How are we assessing outcomes and course effectiveness? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the course from student and faculty perspectives?

4. Lessons Learned: What is working, what needs to be changed? How do we overcome some of the typical challenges of interprofessional education at the course level? What are the beginning challenges and ongoing challenges to offering an interprofessional course for beginning-level students?

Click to view the webcast of this project.

This presentation will describe an innovative educational program, Interprofessional Education Day, developed for all first and second year health profession students at the Medical University of South Carolina. The planning process, learning activities, lessons learned, and program evaluation results, including participant satisfaction and measures of attitudes, will be presented.

This paper session will address how IPE can be successfully introduced across a health sciences center campus to learners early in their education, and how such an initiative can address all learners on campus, and not particular subsets. The session will describe the planning associated with Interprofessional Education (IPE) Day at the Medical University of South Carolina to highlight how an interprofessional faculty group can work through tough issues (i.e., coordinating a day for the event, planning learning activities, communicating requirements across campus, etc.), as well as the learning activities students in which students participated. The session will provide outcomes from this educational innovation, including participant satisfaction and measures associated with attitudinal changes. The session will address lessons learned from the experience so that others may adapt the experience to their own institution.

This session describes the development and success of an Interprofessional Education Day at the University of California, San Francisco. Students from dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy were involved in an interactive learning experience on patient safety, communication and team collaboration.

Interprofessional education, especially as it relates to the health professions, necessitates a profound culture change. Such change is unlikely to happen without solid leadership from the highest levels of university and school administration as well as from a cadre of dedicated champions at all levels. At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) deans from the Schools of Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy charged the associate deans to move beyond the traditional barriers and to “make something happen” on this campus in the area of interprofessional education. Previously at UCSF, ad hoc efforts to bring health professions students together had been limited in scope and in degree of success. A task force, comprised of the associate deans, faculty, students, and staff planned and implemented an Interprofessional Education Day in September 2006 where every new health professions student (456) would have the opportunity to meet and interact in the context of a structured activity. We identified “Patient safety” as the focus of a 2 hour session that was deemed to have immediate relevance to students from all disciplines. Students were asked to read materials in advance, to observe case studies using live actors, to break into small interprofessional groups, and to critique what they were witnessing. This particular focus was chosen because of the importance of communication, collaboration and teamwork as key components in the provision of safe, high quality health care and part of the required curriculum for all students.

What Works

One of the most important aspects of this culture change is bringing together the individuals who have responsibility for schedules and curriculum for their respective programs. Because of the highly independent nature of various disciplines at UCSF, the associate deans for academic programs from the four schools had never met and certainly never worked collaboratively. Once assembled at the same table, we began slowly to identify the barriers to interprofessional education and to plan the first ever Interprofessional Education Day. We realized early on the need to include faculty and students on the task force for both practical and symbolic reasons. A skit was soon developed based on a real-life incident that had taken place at our institution – a scenario that highlighted how poor communication can lead to unintended poor patient outcomes. The deans from the four schools agreed to serve as the actors in the skit (the Dean of the School of Medicine played a pharmacist, the Dean of the School of Nursing played the physician, the Dean of the School of Pharmacy played the nurse, the Dean of the School of Dentistry served as the narrator, and a student assumed the role of the patient). Each student had received a complimentary copy of Bob Wachter’s book “Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes,” and Dr. Wachter spoke about the critical importance of interprofessional teamwork to patient safety. Student interaction was assured through time set aside for questions and small group work in interprofessional teams.

Critical Success Factors

During Interprofessional Education Day, the deans not only participated in the skit but, in a special segment of the program, spoke of their personal commitment to interprofessional education. Students evaluated the “interaction with their fellow students in other schools” and “hearing from the deans” as the best aspects of the day. Immediately after the program students began asking for more opportunities to learn together. A registered campus organization emerged which was given the name “Students for Interprofessional Learning.” SIL has since sponsored a course on different learning styles and another on communication. A faculty sub-group with representation from all the schools is working to develop curricular modules that will deal with professional roles of team members and communication. The deans, apparently pleased with the results of the first Interprofessional Education Day at UCSF have asked that this be made an annual event and have agreed to participate and it is on the calendar for September 2007.

Unresolved Issues

The impact of Interprofessional Education Day over time needs to be examined. We frankly do not know whether there is any measurable improvement in interprofessional relationships as a result of this formative activity. Will this interaction lead to improved patient –focused care? This work has yet to be done. And how to resolve interprofessional scheduling challenges on a campus where space, time, and funds are all at a premium is a daunting task yet to be tackled. While UCSF enjoys a national reputation for excellence in education, research and service, students from the four schools still have few opportunities to sit together in the same classroom. We must work to break down the silos of our professions and find ways to build on the momentum of this early progress.

Recommendations

In addition to continuing to host an annual Interprofessional Education Day, there is a great need to develop supplementary interprofessional programs, interactions, and learning activities early in the curriculum. Additionally, it would be important to co-sponsor seminars and programs with the Students for Interprofessional Learning and to encourage more teaching of cross-disciplinary content that does not depend on electives. An event such as Interprofessional Education Day is but a first step. Our goal and our hope is to integrate frequent related activities throughout the curriculum and to evaluate the long term effect of such novel approaches to interprofessional teaching and training. Aligning incentives with this new educational paradigm will be essential. With the leadership of the various schools in full support, we are confident this dream can be realized.

This session discusses the logistical, organizational and educational factors associated with developing and implementing a large-scale interprofessional education event for over 1000 first year health sciences students. It also will provide feedback from an evaluation which gathered survey and focus group data related to the student experience of this event.

The session will draw on the 3P (presage-process-product) model to help understand the nature of underlying contextual issues, learning and teaching processes as well as program outcomes related to this interprofessional event. The use of this model will also help illuminate a number of lessons learnt in developing and delivering a large interprofessional education event for pre-licensure students from nine health science programs.

The Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences is Canada’s largest educational institution dedicated solely to the education of highly competent applied health practitioners, members of the interprofessional health care team. Responding to a plea for new and innovative models of educating these professionals (Health Canada Council, 2005), the Michener has developed and implemented a new curriculum model based on the tenets of Interprofessional Collaboration, Simulation-enhanced Education and Healthcare Competency Assessment. A critical ingredient to the successful implementation of this new curriculum is meeting the professional development needs of the Institute’s staff and faculty. To this end, a unique, 3-day residential experience (Interprofessional Collaboration Camp) was created by choosing significant components of the new curriculum that integrate communication, team work, and conflict resolution to use as learning activities. The goals of Camp include communicating a shared understanding of Interprofessional Collaboration, discovering effective teaching strategies for embedding Interprofessional Collaboration in the curriculum, developing a collaborative practice framework for Michener and utilizing reflective practice for personal and professional growth. The impact of Camp on participants’ perceptions of and readiness for collaborative practice was assessed and disseminated for future Camp iterations.

Introducing a new curriculum model is as much about change management as it is about the new content. This interactive presentation will model the process used at The Michener Institute to facilitate the introduction of a new Interprofessional curriculum model. Participants of this workshop will discuss how active, constructive, collaborative, conversational, reflective, contextualized, complex and intentional learning were used in a professional development experience to foster a climate for transformational change.

Workshop Overview

An overview of the curriculum model (Presenter)
Interactive learning activities (examples of what were used in IPC Camp facilitated by presenter - group to participate)
Use of a Debrief process to consolidate learning from the Interactive Activities (presenter led - group to participate)
Presenter led discussion on Change Methodology
Closing Reflections (group)

Interdisciplinary health care is especially critical in rural and frontier areas. Since 1999, faculty from the health-related disciplines at The University of South Dakota have been building annual workshops with the goal of educating students about various health professions through shared learning, interacting, and collaboration. The event has grown to over 240 students each year across 12 academic health-related programs (Health Administration, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Studies, Dental Hygiene, Dietetics, Nursing, Social Work, Audiology, Medicine, Occupational Therapy, Physician Assistant Studies, Physical Therapy, and Speech-Language Pathology). While the administrative structure and learning process of the workshops have evolved to meet the goal of the workshop, the overarching goal has remained the same.

Prior to the workshop, students are divided into interdisciplinary health care teams. During the workshop each team is presented with 2 different case scenarios of older adults living in South Dakota that are role-played by faculty, graduate students, or local community members. For each case scenario, the interdisciplinary team develops and presents a plan of care in collaboration with the client based on the client’s medical record, laboratory and other assessment results, and a personal interview with the client. Following the role-play session each team is debriefed regarding the appropriate recommendations for the case.

Pre- and post-event surveys are completed by students and faculty regarding their comfort level in working with other professionals, and in representing their own profession. Results indicated that over 95% of students who participated in the 2006 event reported they had at least one change in comfort level in interdisciplinary teamwork after participating in the event. The categories of comfort level for working and referring clients to the various disciplines were: “not real comfortable,” “somewhat comfortable,” know about the discipline, but still some discomfort,” and “very comfortable in knowing the discipline and the services they provide.” All faculty surveyed in 2006 believed that the interdisciplinary training event enhances their own teaching, leads to improved patient care, increases respect for other disciplines, and enhances their own team skills. Future training events will include increased cultural diversity in the case scenarios.

The proposed workshop will be an interactive session that will give session participants the opportunity to participate in the team training concept that has been implemented at The University of South Dakota. It will include a discussion of the theory that guided the development of the workshop, the history of how the workshop has evolved over time, the strengths of and barriers to the workshop, and the future directions of the event. Participants of this session will leave with the key components for building an interdisciplinary workshop which involves students from multiple healthcare disciplines.

East Tennessee State University’s Interdisciplinary Rural Health Program illustrates how principles and practices of community-based participatory research (CBPR) can be applied within interprofessional education. Within the session, critical success factors for translating CBPR within a course setting, and barriers related to engaging students, faculty, and community members will be discussed.

The session will highlight issues and methodologies in applying community-based participatory research (CBPR) within an interprofessional health education setting. Outcomes and lessons learned related to using a CBPR approach will be the focus of the session, as well as methods used to provide continuous quality improvement related to CBPR outcomes.

Click to view the webcast of this presentation.

This session will describe the process utilized to determine core competencies for a mandatory interprofessional education curriculum at the University of Toronto. We will share our experiences of moving from conceptualization to formation to utilization. In addition, challenges and strategies to promote competency development in interprofessional education will be explored.

The University of Toronto is developing a mandatory interprofessional education curriculum for all of its ten health science disciplines (dentistry, medical radiation sciences, medicine, nursing, occupational science and occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical education and health, physical therapy, social work, and speech-language pathology) fro 2009. This competency-based, longitudinal curriculum design will include: a mandatory core curriculum; complementary learning activities; simulation experiences; and a 4-week clinical placement where students will learn how to apply the theoretical concepts of collaboration into practice.

The UT has partnered with the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network (TAHSN), comprised of academic hospitals, to build the foundation to develop interprofessional collaboration as a standard to enhance patient care. With the complexity of UT and the immensity of TAHSN, we believe that by engaging different communities across these sites to dialogue and develop innovations related to interprofessional collaboration, there is a greater chance for success and sustainability. In utilizing the TAHSN and UT partnership, nine fully-affiliated hospital organizations and their three associated hospital organizations will link with the six Faculties of Health Sciences, including Social Work and three Departments of Rehabilitation Sciences, along with the Michener Institute and George Brown College. From the UT alone, over 1400 students per year will be impacted by this curriculum.

The curriculum itself will be based on core evolving IPE competencies described as:

Knowledge … of the Roles of Health Professionals
Skills … of Communicating with other Health Professionals
Skills … of Reflectivity
Attitudes and Behaviours … of Mutual Trust, Willingness to Collaborate, and Mutual Respect

This session will describe the process utilized in determining these competencies as well as the actual competencies as the outcome of this process. We will share our experiences of moving from conceptualization to formation to utilization, to illustrate some of the ways we have approached this undertaking. In addition, challenges and strategies to promote competency development in interprofessional education will be explored. A large group didactic overview will be followed by individual reflection and discussion in small and whole group focusing on the challenges and strategies to develop competencies in the participants’ own contexts.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

Experiences with a current interprofessional education initiative and the introduction of required components into the pre-service programs of medicine, pharmacy, social work and nursing at a Canadian university inform his presentation. It will focus on innovative approaches used and lessons learned through an extensive evaluation of the activities.

Discussion of the implications for change in organizational culture and administrative practices to resource and sustain IPE in pre-service programs.

An examination of best practices in gathering evaluative data to assess curriculum content and delivery.

Examination of the lessons learned from an evaluation of the introduction of pre-service IPE curriculum activities to help determine best sustainable and effective practices.

University-based interdisciplinary center trains graduate/professional students from diverse backgrounds to advocate effectively with patients who have serious chronic or life-threatening illnesses. As a result of this interprofessional, experiential educational model, students report learning in areas important to patient advocacy: skills, technical knowledge, consumer’s perspective, and how to work across disciplines/professions.

We will share practical challenges to the CPP clinical education program and our responses to them, which include: hiring a Director of Evaluation and Policy and capturing “better data” to aid evaluation/assessment; continually “growing” the program (for example we recently began a training collaboration with the health sciences library); and addressing the continuing challenge of accommodating the logistical needs of disparate disciplines (academic ivory towers) in order to enable diverse graduate and professional students to participate in the clinical program. As we learn from each client and student, we continue to build persuasive arguments for health systems improvement. Using those experiences, CPP has also begun a Program on Health Systems Change.

We have recently captured five main lessons learned specific to our education model, and will share them with participants, with a particular emphasis on interprofessionalism:

Lesson 1: Advocates must adapt to patients’ changing abilities and needs
Lesson 2: Students and clients can learn together
Lesson 3: Individual advocacy cannot be divorced from systemic advocacy
Lesson 4: Advocacy education must include cultural competence, broadly defined
Lesson 5: Advocacy education requires limited caseloads

The presentation will describe a federally funded project preparing graduate students in physical and occupational therapy, special education, and speech-language pathology to use collaborative skills to develop and achieve a family-centered goal for a child with a disability and his/her family in the home. Student and faculty reflections on the outcomes of inter-professional, inter-institutional pre-service education preparation will be shared.

Lessons learned.
Our two universities, Pacific University and Portland State University recently completed a 6 year federally funded training project to develop collaborative teaming during pre-service preparation of graduate students in the fields of physical therapy, occupational therapy, special education, speech and language pathology. This interprofessional and inter-university project required creativity, flexibility, and dedication on the part of faculty and students. The proposed session will describe our dream, development, and implementation of the project. Cross-disciplinary student learning focused on a child with a disability and her/his family creating a unique opportunity for graduate students to experience the shared responsibility of developing child and family-centered interventions. The frustrations, negotiations, and implementations they experienced are part of everyday “real-world” practice occurrences. Student reflections on the outcomes of this type of preparation will be shared and can potentially suggest a model for future interprofessional course development. In a time when learning is often isolated and technology driven/enhanced, this interprofessional learning opportunity was successful and rewarding. It was also an opportunity for students from health care fields to expand their professional identities in non-medical environments.

The presentation will report on the first year of a three-year initiative, Learning To Care Together, funded by the Ontario Interprofessional Health Education Innovation Fund. This project builds on an innovative new inter-agency interprofessional education (IPE) partnership between George Brown College (GBC), a Toronto-based community college which provides health care training programs for over 2,500 students within the schools of Nursing, Dental Health, Health and Wellness and Health Services Management; and Retirement Residences REIT (RRR), a major provider of long term care and retirement living services across North America.

Our project includes the development and scholarly evaluation of a number of enduring, evidence-based IPE products, including:
(i) an interprofessional preceptor preparation protocol (i.e. health professionals and others who are trained as preceptors for health care students during their community-based IPE placements), building on George Brown’s substantial expertise in discipline-specific preceptor training;
(ii) a range of new high quality, preceptored, interprofessional student placements specifically within retirement living and long term care settings operated by RRR;
(iii) a standardized IPE placement evaluation methodology; and
(iv) IPE curriculum content/modules that are appropriate for both students and employees of long term care and retirement living settings, focusing on issues of particular relevance to serving an elderly resident population. These modules emphasize the collaborative roles and perspectives of the various disciplines, as well as teamwork and collaborative practices.

The project will involve faculty and students from a variety of GBC programs (e.g. BScN Nursing, Practical Nursing, PSW, Dental Hygiene, Denturism, Activation/Gerontology, Fitness & Lifestyle Management, Hearing Instrument Specialist, Health Information Management, Health Informatics, Behavioural Technology, Food and Nutrition Management). RRR employees will develop competence in collaborative practices and become preceptors to GBC students during student placements at RRR residences.

"Seamless Care" is a project funded by Health Canada to facilitate interprofessional collaborative skills in prelicensure health professional students. Fourteen student teams from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry and dental hygiene were modeled in interprofessional collaborative practice at 9 clinical practice sites. This paper reflects on the "lessons learned" concerning process.

The primary focus of our session will be "lessons learned", particularly those concerning process for collaborating and working together as researchers, educators, clinicians, students and patients across health professions, across academic professional programs, and between educational and health care institutions. In our project overview, we will address the research design, theoretical framework, curriculum design and evaluation logic model of Seamless Care: An interprofessional education intervention to facilitate team-based transition care.

Rural health professionals encounter unique challenges and opportunities in providing care. The Rural Mental Health Interprofessional Training Project (RMHITP) was designed to address the challenges and build upon the opportunities. We will outline the RMHITP, experiences in delivering the project, the results of the evaluation and possible options for sustainability.

1. Providing interprofessional continuing education (IPCE) is challenging because there is no “captive audience” and motivating professionals to attend requires planning and attention. We will speak to this issue in the presentation.

2. Providing IPCE in a rural context presents additional complexities from a technical and cost viewpoint as well some opportunities in communities where there is the likelihood of professionals interacting on a regular basis which can form the foundation for the development of an interprofessional team. Aspects of the Rural Mental Health Interprofessional Training Program (RMHITP) designed to manage the complexities and develop the opportunities will be highlighted.

3. The RMHITP was evaluated in two ways: a Pre-Post survey measuring attitude towards interprofessional practice and Focus Groups in which participants discussed their perspectives on the training. The results of these evaluations in six rural communities will be presented.

4. A significant challenge for any interprofessional learning opportunity is to ensure that it is available to other potential learners. We will discuss the options being explored by our team for sustainability of the project.

In this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to a web based Interprofessional Education and Wellness course which was developed and first offered at Lakehead University in the winter of 2005. Mirroring the structure of course, participants will be engaged using didactic methods, role playing, and small group exercises.

The interprofessional web based course is innovative as it is teaching students how to work collaboratively in an academic setting. It is providing a learning environment which encourages the student to broaden their perspective regarding other health related professions. They learn to work effectively and respectfully as a member of a team to produce an integrated, comprehensive wellness plan using the internet as the medium of communication. Throughout the learning process, the students are required to reflect on the process which led to the final product.

From the individual reflection journals and group wellness plans, we have preliminary evidence indicating that there is a positive shift in knowledge, skills and attitudes of the students in the course. We will share our lessons learned in the development and delivery of the course.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) report To Err is Human; Building a Safer Health System estimated that as many as 98,000 patients die every year in hospitals from preventable medical errors. Since the release of the staggering IOM data, considerable discussion has occurred in the United States regarding ways to align the current health science education system to meet the growing concerns related to patient safety. In response, the University of Illinois at Chicago developed an interprofessional patient safety elective that included students from all five health science colleges on our campus. Session participants will have the opportunity to obtain first hand knowledge from the Course Directors about the interprofessional patient safety course design methodology, course objectives, content development strategies, interprofessional health science student recruitment, course delivery, and student demonstration of learning. The two week intensive course focused on the higher-level knowledge, behaviors and skills necessary in today’s rapidly changing health care environment and included a number of national leaders and researchers in patient safety. Educational modules addressed error and safety science, ethics and disclosure of error, continuous quality improvement, safety regulatory and accreditation initiatives, microsystems, simulation training, communication and collaboration skills and interprofessional teams. There will be interactive discussions which will allow participants to experience demonstrations of unique course content, innovative delivery methods, and samples of interprofessional students learning projects. Discussion will include findings on the following questions; 1) How can educators effectively bring interprofessional education into a patient safety curriculum? 2) How can collaboration and communication concepts be woven into an interprofessional course with students from multiple health science disciplines? Information presented will also include the outcomes from the course and lessons learned during the implementation and curricular evaluation over the past two years.

For the past five years, University of Missouri has taught an interprofessional course in quality and patient safety to medical students, nursing students and health management students. A constant feature of this course has been participation in a simulated root cause analysis of an adverse event. Students and faculty have consistently ranked this exercise as having great educational value and have stated that the presence of learners from multiple professional schools has enhanced the learning that has occurred during the event.

The purpose of this workshop will be to allow participants to experience this learning exercise and to identify strategies that might allow them to incorporate a similar learning activity in their educational environment. The session will begin with a brief orientation to root cause analysis to ensure that all attendees are familiar with the objectives of the process. A narrative regarding an adverse event will be shared with the attendees, following which they will be broken into small groups of 8 to 12 individuals. Each small group will be asked to reflect on the adverse event and suggest system issues that may have contributed to the event, with the assistance of a template (see Attachment A). They will then be asked to suggest a few possible system changes that might lessen the chance that such an adverse event would recur.

Following about 30 minutes in small group discussion, the attendees will reconvene as a large group, with a debrief of some of the key issues identified by each small group. After each small group has contributed to the debrief, the attendees will be asked to reflect on the process, identifying what seemed to work well in their small group and what could have been improved.

During the last portion of the session, I will share educational outcomes data regarding the use of this exercise in our interprofessional students. I will highlight some of the issues that have arisen over the past five years, and how we have modified the method of presenting this curriculum over time to improve the impact of the learning experience. The last five minutes of the session will be spent with attendees reflecting on how they might use a learning exercise such as this in their own educational environment. They will be asked to share their ideas with a person sitting near them.

The BRAID project falls under Health Canada’s interprofessional education initiative. BRAID reflects a shared vision of increasing capacity for interprofessional health education through multi-institutional collaboration. The collaborative goals are to implement the project, identify potential drivers and barriers and ensure respective partners have opportunities to positively influence the project’s direction.

The BRAID project has provided project partners and stakeholders opportunities to learn with, from and about each other while building new partnerships and strengthening existing relationships. By changing the way health care professionals are educated an upcoming and existing generation of health professionals in New Brunswick’s unique healthcare environment will have the knowledge, skills/behaviours and attitudes necessary to work effectively in interprofessional teams.

This paper describes the challenges associated with ethical review encountered by educational practice-based projects such as Seamless Care, a Health-Canada funded intervention to prepare prelicensure health professional students at Dalhousie University to become collaborative practitioners. Based on lessons learned, policy changes for Institutional Review Boards will be explored.

This paper describes the development of an observation guide for student teams, as one evaluation method in a Health Canada funded project Seamless Care, a practice-based educational intervention to prepare prelicensure health professional students as competent collaborative practitioners. The presentation will describe the guide’s development, implementation and utility.

Research and Evaluation/assessment:
The session will address the question if observation as a research tool can contribute to connecting IPE with health outcomes - The case of Seamless Care: Interprofessional Education will be shared.

We describe the patient perspective on a newly developed Patient Self-Management Scale in a student interprofessional education project. Patients set goals in three domains: symptom management, emotions, and activities of daily living. They indicated on a visual analogue, the importance, their confidence and satisfaction related to achieving each goal.

Research & Lessons Learned:
This panel discussion addresses the challenges experienced by patients and interprofessional student teams as they assisted patients with chronic health conditions to set three self-management goals.

This session will describe the establishment of a monthly interprofessional seminar series for university faculty. The unique format of the seminars will be shared including a reading list, learning objectives, study questions and excerpts from a seminar guide. Nine-month evaluation results and subsequent revisions to the series will be discussed.

Faculty development is an important factor in developing interprofessional learning experiences for pre-licensure students. This session will provide information about a learning methodology aimed at improving a faculty team's knowledge, skills and attitudes in interprofessional education and collaborative patient centred care. Many faculty and clinicians are familiar with a ‘journal club’ format. The seminar series uses Knowles Tenets of Androgogy (Seven Principles of Adult Learning), reflection, and small group learning methodologies to allow for improved learning outcomes. Session participants will be challenged to think about how the format and structure of the seminar series could be transferred and/or adapted for use in their setting(s).

Description: Interprofessional health sciences teaching is on the rise throughout academic health centers propelled in part by changing accreditation standards and a growing awareness of the benefits of interprofessional, team care. To facilitate faculty adoption of interprofessional teaching, new curricular resources must be developed such as a casebook of interprofessional patient care cases that can be used in a variety of disciplines with a team of students. This workshop will allow participants to review a rubric developed to create collaborative teaching cases for interprofessional students, to review and give input into a series of interprofessional cases that are being developed, and to identify how such interprofessional patient care cases can be utilized in their own environments.

Method: This highly interactive workshop blends a review of the literature with hands-on application in interprofessional case development. The workshop begins with a brief literature review of teaching cases, the use of patient care cases in various health sciences disciplines, and the development of a rubric on the design of interprofessional cases. Following this presentation, participants will engage in a fish bowl exercise to develop an interprofessional patient care plan using an interprofessional patient case. Observers to the fish bowl exercise will use the case rubric to assess the utility of the case and give feedback on how the case materials can be augmented to provide a better curricular resource. The participations will then work in small groups to apply the interprofessional patient care case rubric to three sample patient care cases mirroring a collaborative process used to develop the initial cases. Lastly, participants will discuss application of the cases and case development methodology to their institutions.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

No abstract for this presentation is available.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

Although health professionals are aware of the benefits of collaboration, it is not always reality because there is a lack of education and performance assessment of collaborative practice. A competency-based education framework was used to develop interprofessional facilitator competencies, which guided the design of the Interprofessional Facilitator Development Program.

During the design and development of the competency document and subsequent four-day interactive interprofessional facilitator development workshop, challenges arose in the form of the following questions: What goals are we trying to achieve by preparing interprofessional facilitators? Is there an expectation that all health professional facilitators share the same competencies in interprofessional facilitation, collaborative-patient centred practice, and cultural competence? Are these competencies only useful for interprofessional facilitation in the educational arena or are they applicable to the practice setting? Presenters will engage the audience to critically examine whether the competency document and the interprofessional facilitator development workshop prepares and allows assessment of health professionals in education and collaborative working environments.

Meaningful change supporting health care teamwork can only occur if strategies are directed at the interface between interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional care (IPC). The presenters will use years of experience to guide participants in considering critical questions and answers on how to move the health care teamwork field forward.

IPE and IPC have had a long and checkered history, with the field “littered with the bodies of the good intentions” of those who have tried to bring about real change in support of health care teamwork. Only by critically examining the dynamic forces at work at the interface between IPE and IPC is real, long-term change possible. Experiences from both the US and Canada will be used to develop a set of change strategies in support of the training of health professionals to work on teams, the formation and maintenance of such teams in the clinical setting, and the measurement of their effectiveness.

These presentations will include: (1) a discussion of the Ontario Hospital Report: Rehabilitation and the process of its development of quality indicators for interprofessional practice, including findings related to the interrelationships among System Integration and Change (SIC), Clinical Utilization and Outcomes (CUO), and Client Perspectives (CP) factors, (2) a discussion of “what has changed and what has remained the same” in IPE and IPC over the past 30 years in the US, and the need for a far-reaching and comprehensive policy mandate for them to be implemented successfully, and (3) a critique of the factors that work to impede and facilitate changes in higher education, and the development of a set of recommendations for change in systems that traditionally have resisted it.

Overall, the focus of this session is on “lessons learned” from history on both sides of the border, with an emphasis on finding leverage points to bring about the changes necessary to move both IPE and IPC forward in a more linked fashion than has occurred in the past.

The health administrator has a clear responsibility to lead a transformation of health care delivery organizations from “doctor’s workshops” to “interprofessional service organizations,” yet the administrator is often overlooked as a key component of interprofessional teams. We discuss the administrator’s new role and related innovations in health administration education.

The absence of health administrators on interprofessional teams is notable. Administrators need to assume a more proactive and prominent role in promoting and leading interprofessional practice. This is a major challenge, if not a “tough question.” The session will report lessons learned by three health administrator educators from two of the top health administration programs in North America (University of Minnesota, Virginia Commonwealth University). Learning and teaching methodologies will be discussed. Practice methodologies will receive some attention, because two of the presenters (Mosser and White) have long-term experience in healthcare organization management. Research and evaluation/assessment ideas will be proposed.

A community of practice model was used to foster lateral mentoring and interprofessional practice in clinical environments. We will highlight how this approach can be effectively used to link education and practice including faculty, students, clinical placement coordinators and preceptors. Challenges with implementation and creative solutions will be demonstrated.

The presentation will inform track 1: Programs for new model of care by demonstrating an innovative approach to bringing education and practice together. Communities of practice have been used in the business world, but have not been explored extensively in health care. Our project suggests that using communities of practice can improve communication and collaboration and help develop IP competencies in students and health professionals.

This presentation focuses on discussion of overcoming the administrative issues of interprofessional education. Capitalizing on the strengths of the individual institution’s means to overcome challenges will be discussed. Participants will apply possible solutions for their environment. Consideration of the importance of accreditation standards facilitating interprofessional education will be addressed.

Traditional organizational structures, processes and space found in education institutions do not automatically support a curriculum where students learn with, from and about one another as defined by Interprofessional Education (IPE). Therefore, to successfully introduce IPE within a siloed environment, one has to look at the transformation as a large scale change project.

Much has been written about the barriers to implementing IPE. This presentation will focus on how George Brown College (an urban Toronto community college) has launched and still is developing, implementing and evaluating IPE within its Centre for Health Sciences. The Centre consists of 2,500 full-time students and 4 schools which include Nursing, Dental Health, Health and Wellness, and Health Services Management.

The presentation will include an overview of the Centre’s theoretical framework which was developed to guide faculty and staff through the change process by illustrating the links to the many components (both internal and external). These components include the need for a new organization structure, the shift in curriculum priorities, the impact of the government’s new health human resource plan, the need for more collaboration with other educational and clinical partners, and the need for better integrated space.

The presentation will also identify what the impact has been on faculty and the professional development needed to sustain these changes.

How do we create interprofessional learning environments that foster innovation? Faculty representing seven healthcare and design disciplines at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University share their experience in “Hospital Room of the Future,” a graduate course in which student teams built full-size models of new solutions for hospital design.

In this session, the presenters will talk about lessons learned in teaching an experimental course, “Creating the Hospital Room of the Future” that brought together graduate students and faculty in nursing, architecture, industrial design, engineering, healthcare systems, human-computer interaction, and computer sciences to study current problems in the design of healthcare settings, integrate the evidence base of their respective disciplines, and build life-size mock-ups of new solutions. In the presentation, we plan to describe our the “tough questions” we experienced related to recruiting across universities, exposing students from multiple disciplines to real-world problems in health care, educating students in the different concepts and languages of various disciplines, and supporting student teams to design prototypes that required the contributions of every team member for completion.

We also want to focus on our ideas and questions about how to foster and evaluate interdisciplinary creativity and innovation in the classroom. Our intent with this course was to establish a prototype for problem and evidence-based learning in healthcare design and to provide students with an “aha” experience in the process and benefits of working together. The course was structured so that students could not be successful unless they relied on the knowledge and experience of team members from other fields. As we look at our evaluation, we found that the course achieved many traditional process and outcome markers for success: student projects required collaboration and a number even demonstrated unique solutions that may be patented. Students and faculty were highly satisfied with the experience. As we design new courses, we are now reflecting on this experience and would relish the dialogue about how to develop more efficient and effective strategies for nurturing and evaluating the synergy that we saw happen when students from healthcare and design worked together to create better healthcare environments.

Over the centuries there have been reported cases of people benefiting from gardens, landscapes and interaction with plants. More recently, researchers have begun to substantiate a whole host of positive effects plants have on people. In particular, Roger Ulrich’s, 1984, landmark study called “Room with a View” where patients recovering from surgery were split into two groups – one group looked out at a empty brick wall while the other looked at nature. The group with a view to nature had a decrease in analgesic use, decrease in hospital complaints, and returned home sooner than the other group. Ulrich’s work has sparked a well-spring of research into the nexus of plants and health care.

Not surprisingly, the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum brought Dr. Ulrich (and others) together in 2001 to shed light on this subject. From this conference, the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum’s Center for Therapeutic Horticulture (CTH) and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing (CSH) have been building an academic program that focuses on the relationship between the environment, design and heath.

The focus of this proposal session is how two departments (Horticulture and Integrative Medicine) within the University of Minnesota have come together in a interdisciplinary approach to teaching evidence-based therapeutic landscape design (among other courses). At this session you will learn:

• History of collaboration
• Short introduction to rationale and benefits of therapeutic landscape design
• Practical application of methods used within teaching across disciplines
• Examples of student work drawn from courses

The College of Health Disciplines at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada has developed a model for interprofessional health and human service education that follows a continuum of learning from the beginning of pre-licensure training to continuing professional development post-licensure. The emerging University of British Columbia (UBC) model focuses on a vision or goal of improved patient care and safety through patient/client-centred collaborative practice facilitated by interprofessional education. The learning process is examined from professional, personal and interprofessional perspectives. The educational continuum is built upon the developmental stages of exposure, immersion and mastery. There are mixed views on the most effective timing of interprofessional education. In the early stages of health and human service professional education, a sense of professional identity has not yet developed. Is it therefore too early to introduce interprofessional practice at this stage? In the later stages of educational programs, the professional identity may be so firmly entrenched that collaboration is more difficult. Is it then too late? The UBC model uses the concept of exposure to introduce students to other health and human service professionals. As professional identity starts to grow, immersion allows students to learn with, from and about each other in case discussions, practice education settings, and classroom learning. Mastery may not be achieved until post-licensure and the continuum of interprofessional learning then becomes an iterative process through the length of a career. As this is an emerging model, the presentation will identify the critical conceptual frameworks for IPE, the key principles of interprofessional learning and the development of educational strategies for each stage of the UBC model.

Click to view the webcast of this presentation

The University of Toronto is establishing a mandatory interprofessional education curriculum for its ten health science disciplines by 2009. This competency-based, longitudinal curriculum will include: a mandatory core curriculum, complementary learning activities, simulation experiences and a four-week clinical placement. This session describes its framework, objectives, key components and critical structures.

Project Summary:
The University of Toronto (UT) is establishing a mandatory interprofessional education (IPE) curricula by 2009 for all students from the Faculties of Health Sciences [including The Faculties of Dentistry, Medicine (including the Departments of Medical Radiation Sciences, Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy and Speech-language Pathology), Nursing, Pharmacy, Physical Education and Health and Social Work] in order that they will graduate with IPE competencies. This will ensure that they are able to practice interprofessional collaboration (IPC). Monies were received from the provincial government in March 2007 to create a curriculum that is: based upon what evidence is currently known on IPE; theoretically driven; pedagogically sound; relevant to learners and faculty; and ultimately relevant to the patients served. This competency-based, longitudinal curriculum design will include: a mandatory core curriculum; complementary learning activities; simulation experiences; and a 4-week clinical placement where students will learn how to apply the theoretical concepts of collaboration into practice. Specifically, this project will develop the following:

1. Modules to address interprofessional competencies that link to governmental priorities (e.g., chronic disease management and reduced wait times – through wellness & prevention).
   
2. Clinical placements applied in different clinical settings reflecting the patient’s/client’s trajectory of care.
   
3. Formative and summative assessment tools focusing on Objective Clinical Structured Evaluations (OSCEs), learning portfolios and self/peer assessments.
   Provision of an established IPE faculty development course to faculty at UT.
   
4. Implementation of an established preceptorship program for staff involved in clinical placements.
   
5. An inventory and map of all current health professional learning curricula across the faculties and clinical placement settings to ensure implementation of modules and placements by 2009.
   
6. Program Evaluation of UT as a case study highlighting the challenges, successes, barriers and levers that have been experienced in trying to engage in the change process.
   
7. Participation across Faculties and academic organizations where ownership is felt by all ensuring success, sustainability, and a cultural shift towards accepting IPE as a norm rather than an add-on at UT.

The UT has partnered with the Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network (TAHSN), comprised of academic hospitals, to build the foundation to develop interprofessional collaboration as a standard to enhance patient care across TASHN. With the complexity of UT and the immensity of TAHSN, we believe that by engaging different communities across these sites to dialogue and develop innovations related to interprofessional collaboration, there is a greater chance for success and sustainability. In utilizing the TAHSN and UT partnership, nine fully-affiliated hospital organizations and their three associated hospital organizations will link with the six Faculties of Health Sciences, including Social Work and three Departments of Rehabilitation Sciences, along with the Michener Institute and George Brown College. From the UT alone, over 1400 students per year will be impacted by this curriculum.

Project overview:
This session will describe the framework, objectives, key components and critical structures of this proposed curriculum. The curriculum itself will be based on core evolving IPE competencies described as:

• Knowledge … of the Roles of Health Professionals
• Skills … of Communicating with other Health Professionals
• Skills … of Reflectivity
• Attitudes and Behaviours … of Mutual Trust, Willingness to Collaborate, and Mutual Respect

The curriculum that will be developed will consist of:

1. Two core IPE foundational content sessions: (a) Sensitizing to Interprofessional Patient- Centred Care (already existing); and (b) Interprofessional Communication Skills (to be developed).
2. The use of different types of learning activities including modules, simulations, and placements where core competencies are weaved throughout.
3. A variety of topics that will act as vectors to teach IPE competencies in modules that will be used as complementary learning activities. This proposal will develop the following modules: (a) Community Health; (b) Wellness & Prevention; (c) Chronic Disease Management; (d) Enhancing End of Life Care; and (e) Critical Care & Patient Safety.
4. Opportunities to practice collaboration skills using simulations and standardized patients.
5. A consolidation period where learners can apply their theoretical knowledge in clinical placements. This proposal will develop the curricula for clinical placements in: (a) Primary Care; (b) Rehabilitation Care; (c) Acute Care; (d)Rural/Remote; and (e)Long-term Care.
6. Assessment of all learners to determine acquisition of competencies in collaboration. This proposal will develop, test, and pilot assessment tools

Although interprofessional health education is enticing, promoting IPE across a wide diversity of academic and health professions programs is daunting. We will share our experiences in developing a core curriculum in a School of Public Health and Health Professions and will reflect on aspects of implementation, evaluation, and dissemination.

In 2005, the UB School of Public Health and Health Professions (SPHHP) embarked on the development of a core curriculum that would provide a shared base of knowledge among our students and enable SPHHP to be more than a mere sum of its 16 undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs. The core curriculum recently received funding from the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, allowing us to further develop and eventually disseminate materials that may be utilized by other colleges and universities. Using a modified action research approach, we have now developed core curriculum objectives and will (by Fall, 2007) have an evaluation procedure in place for collection of baseline data. We will then progress toward developing core curriculum learning activities and materials that will be implemented as early as the Spring of 2008.

In this presentation, we will highlight the process that has been undertaken to encourage faculty to systematically develop core curriculum objectives that will be mapped to each of our academic and professional programs, and begin to consider learning resources that will help students to meet those objectives. We will also highlight the importance of development of evaluation methods to accurately measure the degree of success of the core curriculum, with a schedule to revisit and modify the curriculum accordingly.

Some “tough questions” we will address are:

• How do you develop IPE that the majority of stakeholders can “buy into”?
• How do you promote IPE while maintaining the integrity of individual programs and complying with accreditation requirements?
• How do you develop IPE without weighing down program curricula with extra credits?
• How do you know if your IPE is working?

This session will present findings of a recent study on the status of interprofessional education in US curricula and discuss collaborative efforts in and between the US and Canada to define standards for professional degree programs, including expected interprofessional classroom and experiential education.

The Interprofessional Network of BC (InBC) engages communities of practitioners and community leaders in the implementation and evaluation of interprofessional education for collaborative patient-centred care. A program logic model was used to determine the evaluation metrics for the network (In-BC) itself. This presentation describes the network logic model, associated evaluation processes, and results to date.

The In-BC evaluation framework is a complex and thorough evaluation process for interprofessional education. It provides one way of organizing a network evaluation to effect system change. The learning process in developing and implementing a network evaluation will be valuable to those about to start such an initiative. The outcomes of the first network evaluation survey will demonstrate the challenges and success factors as a way of informing future initiatives that are similar. The lessons learned from the development of the logic model through to the first survey of network stakeholders will be valuable for participants.

The Interprofessional Network of BC (InBC) engages communities of practitioners and community leaders in the implementation and evaluation of local projects designed to enhance interprofessional education for collaborative patient-centred care. A program logic model was developed to determine the inputs, outputs, indicators and outcomes of the network (In-BC) itself. The domains for the network evaluation comprised curriculum, evaluation and knowledge translation/communication. Evaluation indicators are related to policy, resources, impact and other overarching issues. An electronic survey was conducted to determine the level to which the network (In-BC) has been successful so far in meeting its goals. Results suggest accomplishments in the areas of evaluation, gaps in the development of curriculum, and an emerging, positive focus on knowledge translation and communication. Overall, the survey indicated strong support for a sustainable provincial network. This presentation will describe the logic model and its development, the establishment of indicators and domains, the survey and results, and next steps to strengthen the network and ensure sustainability.

Click to view the webcast of this presentation.

Quality and Safety Education in Nursing (QSEN) is an initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with a long-range goal of reshaping professional identity formation in nursing to include commitment to quality and safety competencies recommended by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). QSEN faculty have defined six pre-licensure nursing quality and safety competencies: patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, safety, and informatics.1 Successful mastery of these competencies should equip nurses completing their pre-licensure training to serve more effectively as members of interprofessional teams within health care systems. In the proposed presentation, the six competencies will be briefly reviewed, with emphasis placed upon the “teamwork and collaboration” competency. The applicability of these competencies to other types of health professional students/trainees will be discussed.

Many of the quality and safety competencies outlined by QSEN are amenable to teaching in an interprofessional environment. Such interprofessional learning experiences should promote the development of interprofessional understanding, enhance teamwork skills, and foster collaboration. In the 90 minute panel discussion, the presenters will draw both upon their national involvement in QSEN and their experiences in interprofessional education to discuss how interprofessional learning may enhance the successful acquisition of quality and safety competencies. The history of interprofessional education will be reviewed, and the evidence regarding the efficacy of interprofessional educational experiences will be outlined.2 A variety of strategies that promote success in interprofessional education will be summarized. Common barriers to interprofessional education will be summarized, and methods for overcoming such barriers will be suggested.3 The importance of measuring educational outcomes will be emphasized, and several methods for assessing the impact of interprofessional educational offerings will be reviewed.

Each of the panel members will present for 20 to 25 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for questions at the end of the presentation.

References:

1. Quality and Safety Education for Nurses website: www.qsen.org.
2. Barr H, I Koppel, S Reeves, M Hammick, D Freeth. Effective Interprofessional Education: Argument, Assumption & Evidence. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, CAIPE, London, 2005.
3. Barnsteiner J, JM Disch, LW Hall, D Mayer, S Moore. Promoting Interprofessional Education. Nursing Outlook; May-June 2007, in press.

Click to view the webcast of this presentation.

Are you concerned about the sustainability of your interprofessional project? Would a toolkit outlining strategies for engaging policymakers and decision-makers be helpful? This session will lead participants through the practical application of a dissemination toolkit based on the lessons learned by the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (CIHC), In-BC and the University of Toronto’s Office of Interprofessional Education.

Creating a permanent cultural shift in the way health care services are delivered requires an enormous amount of coordination and collaboration among many leaders at micro, meso and macro levels of the system. Many initiatives face sustainability challenges, and without detailed strategies that effectively engage policy and decision-makers, these initiatives run the risk of being excluded from ongoing health system planning. Identifying relevant policymakers, tailoring key messages, and selecting the appropriate messenger(s) for a given audience requires a unique skill-set that is not always inherent to project leaders. Our user-friendly toolkit can give your organization the detailed instructions you need to design and implement a strategy that is right for you. This session will build upon a recent literature review on knowledge translation and exchange practices as they relate to policy and interprofessional education for collaborative patient-centred practice (IECPCP). The session will also provide examples of strategies used at national, provincial/territorial and community levels.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

This presentation reports on progress with three inter-linked interprofessional systematic reviews for the Cochrane Library. Two reviews are updates of earlier work on the effects of interprofessional education and the effects of interprofessional collaboration. The third is a new review examining the effects of interprofessional case management on patient care.

This presentation will focus on the critical role of rigorous quantitative research evidence in promoting interprofessional collaboration in education, practice, and policy. Specifically, it will discuss conceptual and methodological issues related to these reviews as well as report findings and outline a number of implications for the advancement of interprofessional education, collaboration and coordination.

The Achieving Competence Today curriculum was developed by Partnerships for Quality Education (PQE), with sponsorship of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This curriculum was initially designed as a four module course aimed at engaging medical residents in active, self-directed work to learn about improvement of the health care system. Following successful implementation in 18 internal medicine residencies between 2002 and 2004, the learner focus broadened in 2005 to include interprofessional teams of residents and graduate nursing students. This expanded focus on interprofessional learning was performed in collaboration with the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). Twelve institutions successfully implemented this program in 2005, and thirteen institutions participated in 2006. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has funded seven academic health centers to continue interprofessional education about improving health care utilizing the ACT model from 2006 to 2008.

Although the methods used to teach this curriculum have varied somewhat at the participating institutions, several critical success factors have emerged from this initiative:

• Action-oriented learning has successfully engaged learners, as they were asked to analyze functioning of the health care system and propose quality improvement projects. The requirement for production of a quality improvement plan has been a vital component of the learning experience.
• Linkage of the learners with quality improvement experts within their health care system has improved the impact of the work. These connections have helped learners to navigate barriers and successfully implement proposed improvements.
• Interprofessional collaboration has been a key element in the evolving ACT model, and has been broadly appreciated by the learners.

We describe the development and validation of a new instrument to measure student’s perceived self-efficacy for interprofessional collaborative practice. This scale was developed by the research team, validated by a panel of Canadian experts, and subjected to reliability testing in a large sample of Dalhousie University undergraduate health professional students.

Research and evaluation/assessment:
This session address two important issues: the lack of evaluation instruments to assess outcomes of IPE and specifically, the lack of theory based instruments. This session will explain the underlying theory and the validation process, including reliability studies, for the “Self Efficacy Measure for Interprofessional Practice for Students”.

The education of health care professionals has been criticized for failing to provide experiences that promote interprofessional teamwork in the academic setting (Committee on Health Professions Education, 2003, Howell, 2005). In order to address this concern, eight disciplines at the University of North Dakota came together to develop an Interprofessional Health Care Course using patient cases to drive student learning and foster interprofessional communication and collaboration. The disciplines involved include: medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant, social work, speech-language pathology and dietetics.

The course is modeled after the Patient Centered Learning (PCL) curriculum of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences where small group learning sessions facilitate the integration of the basic sciences with clinically relevant cases. The instructors come from all of the represented disciplines and each instructor is trained in the PCL approach to facilitate the team of student learners who discern and create specific learning objectives as the case is discussed. During the six week, one credit course, students’ learning centers on discussion and problem solving for two case studies specifically designed to meet the objectives for this course.

The course has been offered for one year in which 456 students (65 small groups lead by a trained facilitator. The development of course evaluation materials has been an evolving process and has reflected the input and collaboration of students, faculty, and administrators (Maki, 2004).

The development team focused on strategies and formats for evaluation of learning. These strategies included written and clinical exams, practical application activities, reaction papers, journaling, etc. Differences in program philosophies led to lively discussions on the best approach to evaluation of performance and learning. The focus was on identifying methods that would meet the needs of all disciplines. As the course continued, constructive changes to the course format, cases, learning objectives, evaluation process and in class activities were implemented as well changing the day the course was offered in order to accommodate additional disciplines.

This presentation will share the resources used in the development of the course, course outline/syllabus, and approaches to evaluation of learning. Outcomes of the evaluation process will be shared.

The following materials have been utilized for the evaluation of the Interprofessional Health Care Course:

Student and Team Performance

1. Formative Evaluation at midpoint
a. Individual student performance
b. Team performance

2. Summative Evaluation at final
a. Individual student performance
b. Team performance
c. Reaction Paper

3. Changes Implemented
a. Reduction to just Team performance
b. Application of Learning with scenarios and cases

Course and Facilitator On-Line Evaluation

1. Course Evaluation
a. Stratified by disciplines
2. Facilitator Evaluation

References
Greiner AC, Knebel E, eds, Committee on the Health Professions Education Summit, Institute of Medicine. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality. 2003. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Howell WLJ. Building bridges between health professions. AAMC Reporter. July 2005;14:6-7.

Maki, P.L. (2004). Assessing for learning: Building a sustainable commitment across the institution. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Clinical skills assessment centers that typically employ methodology utilizing standardized patients are commonly identified as playing a central role in housing and developing simulator programs. The logistics of integrating a simulator into interprofessional health science education poses a unique set of challenges and needs to be considered carefully. This presentation will identify some of the benefits and challenges for health science educators. Discussion questions will include; 1) how is high fidelity simulation utilized/what is the vision for how it can be utilized 2) how is interprofessional team training being exposed to the students currently 3) should interprofessional team training or simulation be part of a clinical learning center’s responsibilities, and 4) what changes in staff and resources would be needed in an institution to accommodate a high fidelity simulator and interprofessional team training. Participants will have the opportunity to obtain first hand knowledge from the Course Directors about training modules utilized at RFU, design methodology, interprofessional training objectives, training content development strategies, instruction delivery strategies, and student demonstration of learning. This will be an interactive discussion and will allow participants to experience demonstrations of interprofessional course content, delivery methods, and outcomes of curricular evaluation. Lessons learned by the faculty at RFU through the design and implementation of this program will be included in the discussion, with a focus on the “next steps” for interprofessional team training and assessment at our University.

Background
Communication is typically the first element to fail in a disaster. Plans are frequently made in silos and the professionals responsible for managing disaster prevention, response and recovery are often educated in corresponding silos, resulting in duplication and a lack of connectivity. Effective team building is critical to preparing for many regional and global, health and safety issues.

The IDEAS Network is a consortium of five educational institutions and key community-based emergency and disaster organizations and professionals in Toronto, Canada working together to design, deliver and evaluate innovative curriculum to provide pre-licensure health sciences (medicine, nursing, allied health), first responders (ambulance, fire, police), community services (social work) and media students with collaborative, interprofessional skills for use in management of complex emergency situations.

Using an innovative combination of online educational gaming, table top simulation exercises and live, full-scale community disaster exercises, feedback gathered through the curriculum and exercises will be used not only to evaluate student performance, but improve actual community disaster and emergency preparedness plans. This process increases awareness of the roles students and professionals play and the importance of teamwork in delivering safe, effective patient-centred care during a mass casualty incident and/or pandemic.

Objectives of the IDEAS Project

1. To develop an innovative, interprofessional, competency-based pre-licensure curriculum for disaster/emergency preparedness (‘IDEAS’).
2. To implement and assess the impact of this curriculum on healthcare and first responders to work collaboratively to deliver casualty or patient-centred care through participation in a high fidelity simulation.
3. To work with professionals within the community to evaluate and test existing disaster plans.
4. To disseminate knowledge on the process of integrating IPE competencies in a pre-licensure curriculum for disaster/emergency preparedness.
5. To sustain the knowledge gained by broadly integrating IPE competencies into curriculum for all pre-licensure health science and first responder students.

Workshop Overview
Using self-reflective and interactive gaming strategies, participants will learn from, with and about each other by playing at designated units in a facilitated table top board game. Participants will be randomly assigned to play the game at one of four tables representing the following professional groups: Security (police, military, civilian), Safety (fire, civil engineers, occupational safety), Health (physician, nurse, paramedic, other allied health members) and Psychosocial (social work, chaplain, media). The scenario is based on actual disasters involving hostage taking in educational settings. The objective of the game is learn what, how and to whom to communicate information to the other players (the four groups of professionals at different tables) in order to preserve lives in a complex and rapidly escalating disaster situation, and to effectively utilize human and fiscal resources. The game terminates with a ‘hot wash debrief’ on critical lessons learned from a systems perspective.

Participants will discuss the use of gaming and simulation as tools in Interprofessional Education. The presenters will also discuss the evaluation methods and the progress to date of the pilot program.

E-learning technologies (e.g., tele- and web-seminar, and vodcasting) have shaped new educational opportunities and can transport programs to major health centers and rural communities within and across national and international boundaries. This project is based on the Education Toolkit developed by the Canadian Collaborative Mental Health Initiative.

The project purpose was to bring together mental health and primary health care providers, consumers, family members, and caregivers to learn from, with and about each other, in order to enhance collaboration, for the purpose of improving the quality of care provided to people seeking mental health services in primary health care settings in Canada. This 90 min session will present the key outcomes from our CE accredited learning programs, lessons learned from using E-learning technologies, and recommendations for improving programs in the future. Our CE accredited ‘Train-the-trainer’ model, implemented using web-seminars, will form the framework for the session. Participants will have an opportunity to benefit from our lessons learned, while actually participating in a live version of our Train-The-Trainer program.

In this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to a web based Interprofessional Education and Wellness course which was developed and first offered at Lakehead University in the winter of 2005. Mirroring the structure of course, participants will be engaged using didactic methods, role playing, and small group exercises.

The interprofessional web based course is innovative as it is teaching students how to work collaboratively in an academic setting. It is providing a learning environment which encourages the student to broaden their perspective regarding other health related professions. They learn to work effectively and respectfully as a member of a team to produce an integrated, comprehensive wellness plan using the internet as the medium of communication. Throughout the learning process, the students are required to reflect on the process which led to the final product.

From the individual reflection journals and group wellness plans, we have preliminary evidence indicating that there is a positive shift in knowledge, skills and attitudes of the students in the course. We will share our lessons learned in the development and delivery of the course.

This presentation describes the development and utilization of an on-line learning activity and resulting workshop based upon on the integration of medical informatics with pedagogical theories and principles of learning, specifically: a) adult learning; b) professional socialization; c) communities of learning and practice; and d) cognitive apprenticeship; with medical informatics. The workshop facilitators and their team developed a software application that was used as the basis of this activity and designed as a teaching strategy to promote interprofessionalism and to encourage clinicians to work together in the development of a patient focused interprofessional care plan.

The workshop included fifteen expert practitioners and one patient, representing five different healthcare professions. The focus of the activity was based upon an electronic case of a post menopausal woman with breast cancer.

Quantitative data was collected from participants who completed pre and post workshop IPRQ (Interprofessional Reciprocity Questionnaires) and internal workshop evaluations. In addition, the entire day was videotaped for further analysis. Evaluated on a Likert scale with 1= least useful and 7=very useful, all participants responded with useful to very useful.

Qualitative data in the form of written comments highlighted the importance of understanding other professional roles and mandates; and of including the voice of the patient. Feedback from participants highlighted the opportunity as one that reinforced an appreciation of “common challenges” and how “together we can provide better care for patients”.

In addition to the qualitative data, participants commented directly on how the use of the electronic case and the resulting interprofessional care plan increased their understanding of uni-professional mandates and their perceptions of professional roles and responsibilities. Following the workshop, the facilitators received several requests to work with other areas in the same hospitals and to develop similar workshops. The workshop also led to a student conference and the same software was used at a student-centered interprofessional workshops. Finally, it was apparent to the participants of the workshop as well as to the facilitators, that the interprofessional care plan that was developed could be repurposed as a patient checklist.

Lessons learned included the need for more whole group activity and less small group activity, the requirement to have participants share information before the workshop and the need for modifications to the software application.

This interactive workshop will discuss the development of innovative narrative-based e-learning modules through partnerships between academic institutions, students and community practitioners. The process and lessons learned from two examples will be shared. Participants will have the opportunity to participate in several of the modules’ learning activities.

The session will review the theoretical basis of interprofessional learning that was applied to the development of these e-learning modules. One module explores the concept of suffering in a person with terminal illness; the other, developed in French, explores the challenges of accessing care and remaining in one’s own rural community, following a serious stroke. Both modules were developed through collaboration with community-based practitioners, students and academics from different disciplines/professions, including the University of Ottawa Theatre Department. Strategies to enhance on-line interactivity and to promote learning with, from and about each other while providing profession-specific educational material will be shared. The use of a narrative as an important methodology will be discussed. Results of pilot trials and lessons learned will be shared.

An October 2006 article in The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine entitled: “The changing library: What clinicians need to know” (pp.867-863) reflects the idea that the nature of medical/hospital/health science libraries and the role of the medical librarian is in flux. Gone are the days when undergraduates, patients, and consumers are turned away from the academic health sciences library. Gone too are the days when librarians were the gatekeepers to formidable databases, or were presented each day with questions from a line-up of customers. Today, with more databases, journals, and information available at the desktop, librarians are reaching out to find partners throughout the medical milieu. From the National Library of Medicine, right down to academic and hospital libraries throughout the nation, librarians are embracing marketing skills, honing people skills, and are committed to seeking out nurses, physicians, therapists, and social workers, with whom they can build connections and relationships. The first part of this presentation draws from the literature to capture these changes.

Innovative programs involving librarians at The Edward G. Miner Library at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) are part of this changing environment. Two examples of these programs are provided in the presentation, focused on collaborations with the Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong. The first is the “Ask a Librarian” consult service. A committee consisting of librarians/physicians/nurses/social workers/administrators devised an Information Prescription ( based on a prototype from the Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt University) that staff could use to request information for patients, and hammered out a procedure for fulfilling the request that met the diverse needs of all providers involved. Librarians produced a detailed list of goals, objectives, and evaluation measures as well. The six month pilot, from June 2006 until January of 2007, begun in three units, was so well received that it now extends to all of Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong. More than that, the nurses there, and one of the units, have agreed to temporarily fund a part time librarian position for the program! Cognizant of areas for improvement as well as already attained strengths, the librarians are working with the units to achieve further successes.

Edward G. Miner librarians have also teamed up with the Sturge Children’s Charitable Foundation and the Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong to produce a user-friendly website for families whose children have been diagnosed with cancer. John and Judi Sturge, a local couple whose son died of cancer many years ago, were the force behind the creation of a central spot on the Internet in which Rochester area families could fortify themselves with information for the long road ahead. Other parents, physicians, social workers, nurses, and a local organization devoted to the same cause, CURE, have had input into the website content and organization. A local web design firm supplied the technical and creative talent. A license for PDQ content was obtained from the National Cancer Institute. Knowledge has been gained about hiring outside companies, and working with stakeholders who have firm ideas! Upon launching of the site, usability studies will be conducted with families. The website’s goal is to provide high quality information, with a local slant, but not overwhelm the newly diagnosed.

Through this presentation, we hope to stimulate awareness and inclusion of medical librarians as potential collaborators in enhancing the health professions’ common goal of delivering patient-centered care, through new uses of library information services and partnerships inclusive of patients and families.

This session explores the results of a research study examining the perceptions of students, teachers and administrators in interprofessional learning environments. Does an interprofessional community of practice form when students from different professional schools come together to learn about developmental disabilities?

Students of health professions become acculturated in their professions. They have become a member of the community of practice of their profession. Can interprofessional learning experiences during their professional education create an interprofessional community of practice? What are the essential components of these effective learning experiences?

Cancer Care Nova Scotia and ten partners are cultivating a community of practice of health care professionals who will facilitate interprofessional cancer education for approximately 1200 community-based health professionals and, through these, improvement of collaborative patient-centred practice within Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Lessons learned.
This project focuses on improving interprofessional collaboration through building professional and community partnerships, educating community-based practicing health professionals and integrating the interprofessional curriculum into undergraduate education. It also focuses upon evaluating the processes and outcomes of the collaboration and the education. Presenters will review the process and lessons learned in building and nurturing partnerships across universities, health districts and communities including the effectiveness of various tools for improving interprofessional collaboration (e.g. facilitator training, delivery of community based modules, implementation into nursing students curriculum, use of website for enhancing community of practice). The presenters will engage the audience in discussing how the approaches from this program could be applied to other jurisdictions and disease entities.

In this presentation we will explore the potential merits of participatory action research (PAR). We will then explore a case study involving the use of PAR and the resulting concerns and confusions of research participants and research ethics boards. Implications for other kinds of qualitative methods will be considered.

This paper will primarily focus on the “real world” challenges of getting buy in for novel research methods, including the task of addressing concerns related to power, authority and researcher involvement in the research projects. Issues of theory will be surfaced, briefly – we also intend to focus on the “lessons learned”.

Organizational culture constitutes the “informal curriculum” for health professions students, shaping their emerging professional identities, behaviors and role expectations. Organizational culture change is thus the next frontier for interprofessional education and practice. Using presentations, case studies and experiential learning, we will explore powerful new approaches for changing organizational culture.

Efforts to advance IPE and IPP to date have focused primarily on the development of individual learner’s skills and knowledge and on providing them with first-hand experience of working with students and/or professionals from other disciplines. But all of this activity is taking place within a larger organizational culture that continues to reinforce traditional patterns of separateness. Only when organizational cultures begin to change can the vision for IPE and IPP be fully realized.

We have undertaken an organization-wide project to change the culture of a large academic medical center, achieving substantial and measurable changes. The project itself has been interprofessional involving students, physicians, nurses, behavioral scientists, biomedical scientists, administrators, and patient advocates, and has opened new paths for interprofessional education and practice. The project has been guided by new theories and methods of organizational change grounded in complexity science and relational psychology (specifically, Complex Responsive Processes of Relating, Social Constructionism, Relationship-centered Care, Appreciative Inquiry and Emergent Design).

This workshop will present these theories and methods, and illustrate their application in a major educational innovation. Participants will have opportunities to reflect on and learn from their own experiences of culture change, to gain first-hand experience with appreciative inquiry and emergent design, and to develop individual action plans for employing these new approaches in their current work.

Working together on the funding process and the implementation of the project in multiple sites was in and of itself a rollercoaster of meta-collaboration. This “case study in action” will explore the process we used to come together to create the project and work together across hospitals and the university. Exploring the story of the initiation and implementation of a project about collaboration illustrates core questions about how to do interprofessional collaboration.

Goal:
We will go deeply into one ongoing story of interprofessional work to surface core principles for successful collaboration, and then will work with workshop participants to deepen collective learning on what is required to move cross-site collaboration and interprofessional care forward. Core principles to be explored include the value of a common vision, how to foster continual learning from each other, and the critical nature of linking interprofessional practice to a concrete goal such as patient-centred care.

Format:
90 minute workshop and active learning session

An interactive session to explore collaborative practices that were consciously applied, how we emerged practices, and the “aha” moments as we recognized what is required to initiate truly collaborative practices in sometimes constraining contexts. The workshop design starts with a “fishbowl style” discussion of the stories of core players, who will learn in the moment from each other using “appreciative inquiry” questions. The conversation will then be expanded to include workshop participants to explore similar questions.

The group will also display and be available to discuss posters and tools about mentorship, coaching, preceptorship and leadership that were the products of the overarching project.

The presenters plan to describe the design and implementation of an interdisciplinary geriatric care experience involving pharmacy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy students. Descriptions of barriers to implementation will be discussed as will successes. Student feedback describing the benefits of the experience will be presented.

What are you learning from these efforts? What policies and structures need to be in place to improve and sustain these efforts? Presenters will discuss the development of a novel model for student learning involving multiple disciplines. Based on our experience, we will talk about difficulties in identification of patient sites, coordination of student and faculty schedules, and administrative barriers that must be considered prior to the development of this type of collaboration.

At the end of the day, does the investment in IPE make a difference? Based on student feedback, we will demonstrate that despite the barriers encountered, IPE can have a positive impact on student learning.

Context: While interprofessional conflict is generally assumed to play an important role in medical errors, there is little supporting empirical evidence.

Research Design: In 1999, the authors surveyed a random sample of 6,106 PGY1 and PGY2 residents regarding their residency experience. A 64.2% response rate (N=3,604) was achieved. Three questions specifically inquired about “serious conflict” with another professional staff member. Residents were also asked whether they had made a “significant medical error”(SME) during their current year of training , and whether these errors had resulted in an “adverse patient outcome”(APO).

Results: Just over 20% (n=722) of the PGY1 and PGY2 residents in the study reported having personally experienced “serious conflict” with another staff member. Nearly 10% (n=354) of these involved another resident, 8.3%(n=295) an attending physician, and 8.9% (n=315) a member of the nursing staff. Over a quarter (27.1%) of the residents(n=958)also reported having made a “significant medical error” during their current year of training, nearly 5% of which had resulted in an “adverse patient outcome”.

Of those residents reporting conflict with another resident, 41.9% reported making a “significant medical error” (SME), with 12.4% of these resulting in an “adverse patient outcome” (APO). By contrast, residents without such conflict reported significantly lower figures of only 25.6% SMEs and 3.95% APOs. Similarly, those residents who admitted conflict with an attending physician reported a SME figure of 46.6% and 12.1% for APOs, as opposed to 25.4% SMEs and 4.2% APOs for those residents without such conflict. Finally, residents who had conflict involving a member of the nursing staff reported 40.3% SMEs and 11.1% APOs, as compared with the significantly lower figures of 25.9% SMEs and 4.2% APOs for those residents without such conflict.

Of the 2,811 residents who reported no interprofessional conflict, 669, or 23.8%, reported making a “significant medical error” (SME), 3.4% of which resulted in an “adverse patient outcome” (APO). By contrast, the 523 residents having serious conflict with at least one other professional reported making 36.4% SMEs and 8.3% APOs, while for the 187 residents reporting conflict with two or more other professionals, the SME rate was 51%, with 16% APOs.

Increasing interprofessional conflict was also significantly associated with decreased satisfaction with resident learning, with contact with and quality of time with attendings, and with the overall resident training experience, as well as with higher ratings of personal stress and greater likelihood of being named in a malpractice suit. On a behavioral level, interprofessional conflict was significantly associated with increased use of alcohol, medications to keep awake, go to sleep, and to “cope with the residency experience”, as well as with self-assessments of “working while impaired”.

Conclusions: Interprofessional conflict and medical errors are positively related, and both are associated with a wide range of other negative experiences during residency training. The combined impact of these variables are seen in main effects only. No significant interactions were observed, meaning that the results are additive, rather than multiplicative. The high degree of association between interprofessional conflict and medical errors in these data is troubling and merits further investigation.

Interprofessional team members will discuss a recent study that demonstrated how an interprofessional approach reduced the length of stay, mortality and overall healthcare cost compared to traditional care in transitional care patients. Experience from this healthcare practice and education model will be shared and discussed to foster a larger realization of these outcomes.

The study design and research methods utilized in assessing the clinical and economic outcomes of an interprofessional team care practice partnering with a community-based healthcare center.

The key structural and procedural elements of practice and teaching methodologies will be discussed.

Specific clinical and economic outcomes will be presented.

Lessons learned will include interprofessional team challenges (i.e., pre-planning team building, leadership, role clarification, system change, communication) and how they were addressed.

This presentation will discuss how the construction of health care professions have generated a number to tensions for them to successfully engage with the current health policy agenda focused on advancing effective interprofessional collaboration for patient-centred care. Key research studies and theories will be drawn upon to illuminate this subject-area.

Other information about session:
How will your proposed session address the cross-cutting themes to address the “tough questions” regarding interprofessional collaboration in education, practice and/or policy?

Research, theory and evaluation/assessment
Learning, teaching, and practice methodologies
Outcomes
Lessons learned.

The presentation will include a range of relevant research studies and sociological theories when discussing/exploring the tensions that have emerged in relation to the development of health care professions and their ability to engage in interprofessional collaboration and patient-centred care. A number of implications about the collaborative patient-centred care movement will also be offered to help map out future directions for leaders and policy makers.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has asserted that although health professionals are required to work in interprofessional teams, they are not educated together or trained in team-based skills. Furthermore, the IOM has recommended a set of five core competencies essential for the expanding roles of healthcare practitioners into the 21st century- interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, informatics and patient-centered care. In response to the IOM report we developed and evaluated a required innovative educational learning experience involving first year students from 8 different healthcare professions across 4 schools in an Academic Health Center. The purpose of this presentation is to describe the content, process, structures and three year outcomes for this educational experience. In addition, barriers to interprofessional education and the lessons we learned will be discussed.

The five core competencies articulated by the IOM formed the foundation of the two-quarter course. 420 first year students from medicine, podiatry, physical therapy, clinical psychology, physician assistant studies, pathologists’ assistant studies, medical radiation physics and clinical laboratory science met in small interprofessional groups with a faculty mentor from any of the professions. Case studies and between class discussions on the web linked the 5 competencies. Students developed their interprofessional team under faculty guidance during Quarter One. Educational methodology in Quarter One included small group discussion, role-playing, student presentation and team-building exercises. The second part of the educational experience in Quarter Two involved a required service learning community project. Students went into the community in their interprofessional team and provided service. Projects included providing healthcare to the underserved, providing health education to elementary students, developing activities for senior citizens and developing educational videos on health topics. As a capstone experience students developed posters on their interprofessional service learning experience which were displayed and celebrated throughout the University during a University-wide Service Learning Poster Day.

Three year outcomes indicate that this learning experience is highly successful. Following the two quarter educational experience students completed a survey evaluating their learning and attitudes. During the presentation we will provide the results to participants. For example, over 85% of respondents agreed to the importance of team interaction and informatics. 92% of students planned to practice collaboratively while 90% felt they could conduct an evidence-based medicine search. Chi square analyses were conducted comparing the attitudes of students who experienced the course versus students from earlier years that did not have the benefit of the educational experience. There was a statistically significant difference between these students in their perception of knowledge of the roles of other health professionals (p

Using the experience of the National Health Sciences Students' Association in Canada as a starting point, participants will discuss the value of student-initiated IPE, the factors that enable and sustain it, and how they can each individually support student-initiated IPE in their local and/or national settings.

FORMAL ABSTRACT

The importance of students initiating IPE efforts has become clear. The ways in which educators, researchers and policymakers can enable such efforts, however, are less known. Building on the experience of the National Health Sciences Students' Association – a diverse network of 19 university-based chapters and over 20 health professions in Canada – participants will discuss the value of student-initiated IPE, the factors that enable and sustain it, and finally how they can each individually support student-initiated IPE in their local and/or national settings. This workshop will inform participants on the various benefits and challenges associated with this innovative method of education delivery and what they can do to support it.

The proposed workshop builds upon previous outcome assessments of the learning, teaching and practice methodologies of student leaders when they initiate IPE efforts. Lessons learned from the rich experience of the National Health Sciences Students’ Association’s 19 university-based chapters will be woven throughout the discussions to better inform participants’ future facilitative efforts in this area.

This proposed workshop would begin with a quick, informal presentation on the development of NaHSSA and an overview of its diverse activities. Various benefits to student-initiated IPE will be discussed in the context of relevant and sustainable learner-centred IPE for collaborative patient-centred practice. This workshop will then serve as a forum for the participants to engage each other in small group discussions on their perceptions of the value of student-initiated IPE, the factors that enable and sustain it, as well as how they can each individually support student-initiated IPE. The idea of supporting and mentoring interprofessional student associations (where none exist) to coordinate these student efforts will also be addressed in a large group discussion. At the end of the workshop, each participant will be given a postcard on which they will write one thing that they will do to support student-initiated IPE; these postcards will then be mailed by the session presenters a couple of weeks following the conference for positive reinforcement.

This proposed workshop has been conceptualized using an appreciative inquiry approach which is an effective adult learning strategy. Additional discussions on this topic beyond the workshop will be encouraged and ongoing support will be provided for participants who wish to facilitate student-initiated IPE efforts.

This paper will present an overview of the Presidential Scholars Program, a non-credit, two-semester interprofessional (thirteen disciplines) initiative in its seventh year. Included in the presentation will be critical success factors, resources, and assessment and evaluation design and outcomes. Lessons learned and recommendations for the future will be shared.

1. Discuss the critical success factors accounting for the initial and ongoing success of the program including how the students are engaged in the process, how faculty participants are selected and supported, and the level of administrative support and resources required.
2. Discuss the strengths and limitations of the evaluation and assessment methods and present outcomes. The program has used a pre and post-test design with a control group to measure aspects of interprofessional understanding and knowledge and perceptions of issues related to health disparities.
3. Address both the advantages and limitations of a non-credit, extracurricular innovation as part of a larger interprofessional education initiative.
4. Highlight lessons learned from the past six years and how they may influence our larger campus effort.

A grounded theory study was conducted to explore the interdisciplinary collaborative learning process of occupational therapy (OT) students engaged in collaborative learning with students from other allied health disciplines. The emergent theory explains OT students’ need to build a culture of mutual respect among disciplines to facilitate interdisciplinary learning.

This session will address tough questions related to research as well as learning and teaching methodologies. This session presents research that describes the learning process that occupational therapy students undergo when they are engaged in collaborative learning with students from a variety of other allied health disciplines. The findings will be useful for faculty from all allied health disciplines who are responsible for teaching occupational therapy students because it may aide in designing interdisciplinary learning experiences that more effectively meet the needs of students from different disciplines.

This innovative project addresses the growing trend toward interprofessionalism in healthcare by empowering a student group to develop their own unique course, guided by faculty members with expertise in the area. At the present time, the focus of interprofessional education is on those students who are already in health professional programs at Western. However, there is another large group of students in such programs as Bachelor of Health Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Kinesiology who are aspiring to be health professionals but do not, as yet, have the disciplinary knowledge and skills to participate in many of the educational opportunities afforded to the health professional student group. The concept of this course has arisen from within this pre-professional group of students with the initial proposal prepared by a student member of the London Interprofessional Health Student Association (LIHSA).

Development of a course by students is a novel way to: (1) assist in enhancing their awareness of curricular approaches within the health professional schools at Western; (2) develop their early appreciation of the importance of cross-disciplinary knowledge, skills and attitudes to challenge existing assumptions; and (3) create new understanding of collaboration through teamwork which is critical to the future of health care and (4) empower students to lend their voice to the future of health care and IPE. Students are guided in creating a course developed around transformative learning shaped through a humanistic educational philosophy, an approach currently not consistently used in the health professional programs. Student directed course development is inherently sound when they are likely to become the future health professionals that will need to deliver care through collaborative teamwork. A team approach with this project will emulate team development that can then be transferred to their health professional programs in future years. Consequently, the course will provide a unique research opportunity to study the benefit of pre-professional IPE preparation and facilitate a longitudinal study of participating students as they enter their respective professional programs and develop as health professionals. Members of the course development team will report on their work to date that reflects completion of 4 of the 8 workshops.

The mission of CHIUS (Community Health Initiative by University Students) is to provide an exciting, dynamic and innovative program that emphasizes the development of mental, emotional, social and physical well-being of all participants in a safe and welcoming environment.

Our inter-professional team will strive towards diminishing barriers to health care, establishing strong partnerships and enhancing the community's perception of health care. We will actively evaluate and refine our service to ensure continual delivery of a high-quality program that is responsive to the needs of all participants.

CHIUS is an interdisciplinary, student-run program at the downtown community health clinic (DCHC) in the downtown east side (DTES) area of Vancouver. Students from different health care disciplines work together to provide patient care under the supervision of their respective health care professions. The student clinic runs every weekend, and generally involves an abundant of clinical and social encounters. After treating patients, students complete patient charts in the SOAP format, and all team members complete a patient encounter log. Due to growth of our program, CHIUS has expanded into creating educational modules from different health displinaries that are delivered by students and health care mentors to residents of the DTES. In our continuing responsibility to ensure the delivery of quality patient care, student education and public safety, we are doing a systemic review of the patient charts and encounter logs. With this, we hope to confirm or further describe the demographics and needs of our patients. These results are also important to ensure that the patient's encounter with the clinic results in the most appropriate care, and that we are meeting the patient's concerns.

Click to view the webcast of this project.

No abstract of this presentation is available.

When health sciences students were asked to define “Inter-Professional Collaboration”, the definitions varied quite significantly between nursing, medicine, occupational therapy and physical therapy learners. The common themes by profession are described and the implications of this understanding from the point of view of the educators are explained.

The session will address the research undertaken by the learners, the feedback they have provided and their involvement in the QUIPPED project to develop interprofessional education at Queen’s University. The process has taken a critical action approach and is constantly evolving. As we learn from the process we provide constant feedback to our team as well as to our colleagues across Canada.