Culminating an Interprofessional Education Initiative

This case-based interprofessional collaboration was based on the curriculum development guide, Advancing Interprofessional Clinical Prevention and Population Health Education, and the expert panel report, Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice. The framework featured in the Core Competencies report, Framework for the Development of Interprofessional Education Values and Core Competencies, guided our conceptualization of how students would develop core competencies using standardized patients. This framework depicts an interprofessional learning continuum in which students achieve core competencies by moving from exposure to immersion to competence. The framework is central to the discussion of culminating our interprofessional initiative spanning three years.

The curriculum development guide was instrumental in developing the standardized patient encounters, because it provided guidance about the development of cases that focus on different core competencies from case to case—or, in an unfolding case. As we developed our unfolding case, we mapped those competencies the activities could support; some competencies were addressed across the unfolding case (e.g., “place the interests of patients and populations at the center of interprofessional health care delivery” and “engage other health professionals in shared patient-centered problem-solving”). We anticipate students will have higher proficiency in competencies addressed across activities and this proficiency will be demonstrated when they culminate their teamwork with patients in a community activity—a key activity of this initiative is the community experience that proceed the unfolding case.

In the final phase of this project, we are assigning each team to an actual patient to follow in either home-based or clinic care, depending on the needs of the patient. This community-based activity is being designed to challenge each interprofessional team to establish a patient-centered, primary-care relationship with a patient similar in chronic care needs the standardized patient they encountered during four case-based learning activities. Faculty are working with collaborating agencies to identify patients with multiple chronic conditions similar to the standardized patients described in the unfolding case. We anticipate that together these activities will help students develop core competencies as well as clinical reasoning, such as “asking others questions as a way of learning” and “seeking various solutions prior to acting.”