This article examines the benefits of a student run free clinic (SRFC) as a service learning experience for students in medicine, pharmacy, occupational therapy, physical therapy and physician assistant programs. We hypothesized that students who participate in an interprofessional service learning course and volunteer at a SRFC would demonstrate significant increases in perceptions and attitudes for working in interprofessional health care teams and clinical reasoning skills compared to students who did not participate. Three assessments were administered to an experimental and control group of pre-clinical students from medical, occupational therapy, physical therapy, pharmacy and physician assistant programs before and after participation in an interprofessional service-learning course and volunteering at the SRFC. The tools were the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale (IEPS), Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) and the Self-Assessment of Clinical Reflection and Reasoning (SACRR). Students who completed the course had improvements in interprofessional perceptions and attitudes (p = 0.03) and perceptions of clinical reasoning skills when compared to the control group (p = 0.002). This study is novel as it examined students' perceptions of interprofessional attitudes and clinical reasoning following participation in an interprofessional service-learning course and participation in a SRFC.
Background: An interprofessional elective using a student-run clinic can introduce students to professional roles, collaborative patient care, and health disparities.
No consensus definition exists for postgraduate physician assistant (PA) training. This report from the AAPA Task Force on Accreditation of Postgraduate PA Training Programs describes the types of clinical training programs and their effects on hiring and compensation of PAs. Although completing a postgraduate program appears to have no effect on compensation, PAs who complete these programs may be favored in the hiring process and frequently report greater confidence in their skills. More research is needed and program accreditation is key to monitoring the effectiveness of these programs.
When the Family Medicine for America’s Health (FMAHealth) Workforce Education and Development Tactic Team (WEDTT) began its work in December 2014, one of its charges from the FMAHealth Board was to increase family physician production to achieve the diverse primary care workforce the United States needs. The WEDTT created a multilevel interfunctional team to work on this priority initiative that included a focus on student, resident, and early-career physician involvement and leadership development. One major outcome was the adoption of a shared aim, known as 25 x 2030. Through a collaboration of the WEDTT and the eight leading family medicine sponsoring organizations, the 25 x 2030 aim is to increase the percentage of US allopathic and osteopathic medical students choosing family medicine from 12% to 25% by the year 2030. The WEDTT developed a package of change ideas based on its theory of what will drive the achievement of 25 x 2030, which led to specific projects completed by the WEDTT and key collaborators. The WEDTT offered recommendations for the future based on its 3-year effort, including policy efforts to improve the social accountability of US medical schools, strategy centered around younger generations’ desires rather than past experiences, active involvement by students and residents, engagement of early-career physicians as role models, focus on simultaneously building and diversifying the family medicine workforce, and security of the scope future family physicians want to practice. The 25 x 2030 initiative, carried forward by the family medicine organizations, will use collective impact to adopt a truly collaborative approach toward achieving this much needed goal for family medicine.
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