Building a Bridge from Campus to Clinic: An Interprofessional Collaborative Experience Roadmap to Implementation
Purpose:
Interprofessional education (IPE) has growing evidence to support students who participate in IPE activities in their training yield enhanced patient outcomes as practitioners. Additionally, IPE is becoming more integrated into health-related professions’ accreditation standards. With this in mind, an interprofessional faculty team composed of the occupational therapy, physical therapy, nutrition, speech language pathology, audiology, medical lab science, diagnostic imaging, and social work disciplines sought support to integrate and accelerate the adaptation of IPE into their college, across the academic health center in which the college resides, and into our community partner’s clinical settings. As a result, this interprofessional team has successfully built a foundation of IPE and Interprofessional Collaborative Practice (IPCP) with on campus faculty and community stakeholders. As a result, this team has piloted an IPCP curriculum in clinical sites and continues to expand the pilot with intentional steps. In this presentation a roadmap will be shared from beginning to end to where audience members can attempt to replicate at their home workplaces.
The purpose of this session is to illustrate how a bridge can be built from campus to clinic in order to provide our students IPCP experiences.
Methods/Description:
The IPCP team secured institutional funding to support a train-the-trainer workshop. From the workshop, the IPCP team made up a majority of the committee that provided an IPE symposium to clinical and community partners. The symposium exposed participants to the dimensions of IPE and IPCP as well as how IPCP could look in their place of practice. The symposium yielded interested clinical partners to participate in a collaborative evening event. This event’s primary purpose was to vet a previously drafted IPCP curriculum. As a result of this event, the IPCP team received several requests for community-based IPCP experiences. The first request resulted in an IPCP pilot experience with student reflections used as the outcome measure. Thematic analysis provided the qualitative framework for assessment of the students’ work.
Results/Outcomes:
Thirty-two faculty and staff across the academic health center attended the train-the-trainer workshop with twelve from the IP team’s home college. The workshop experience elucidated the desire for IPE to have a stronger presence in curricula and clinical practice with next steps being clarified. The IPCP team hosted, spoke and served as facilitators at the IPE symposium which had 92 community partners attend. Of the interested attendees who attended the IPE-based symposium, eight participated in the collaborative evening event. Two of the eight attendees asked for IPCP experiences to occur in their clinics. The pilot IPCP experience student reflections’ analysis yielded strong support for an expanded pilot and further development of the IPCP curriculum.
Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme:
This IPCP journey proved to be successful in action-based results. The analysis supports that the pilot IPCP experience was a success where the experience was highly impactful on students’ future practice and that there is a need further development of the IPCP curricular framework. The next step is to expand the pilot and further vet the IPCP curriculum.