Preparing NPs to Function Interprofessionally through a Health Promotion Curriculum

Healthcare in the United States is in crisis.  One reason is the inability of healthcare professionals to work well with each other.  This may occur due to the lack of role understanding, discomfort with reaching out to other professions, or failure to recognize the importance of interprofessional healthcare.  Costly healthcare problems such as diabetes have been found to respond best to an interprofessional approach where each discipline is seen as the expert in their domain.  However, too often, these issues are managed by sole providers.  By providing future healthcare professionals with interprofessional courses during school, many barriers to interprofessional care can be addressed.  Attendees in this presentation will be prepared to:  1. Develop interprofessional teaching collaborations with faculty from other disciplines, 2. Provide a curriculum that can be attended by students from diverse healthcare professions, and 3. Provide experiential assignments that will increase the student’s ability to work interprofessionally.  This presentation will focus on the development and implementation of an interprofessional didactic course in health promotion.  In order to increase understanding of the roles in other professions, this course is co-taught by faculty from nursing, physical therapy, counseling, and dental hygiene.  Local and distance students from each profession are enrolled together in this web based class.  The School of Nursing has one of the top distance programs in the United States (US News and World report, 2012).  Thus, the NP faculty is able to assist other professions in embracing interprofessional distance learning.   Faculty members from the various disciplines work together in developing and implementing the course content.  The course is then cross-listed in all four programs.  Students participate in on-line didactic sessions and complete interprofessional health promotion projects.  Students from each profession are placed in groups of no more than 5 students.  They use distance technology to complete projects such as: 1) a multimedia presentation for providers on the role of the various professions in addressing the health promotion needs of specific populations or 2) interprofessional technology driven health promotion educational materials for patient populations (webcasts, websites, Facebook pages, blogs, etc).  Examples of course content and project will be provided.