An Interprofessional Curriculum to Advance Relational Coordination and Professionalism in Early-Career Practitioners

Abstract

Introduction: We created a curriculum to help new physicians and nurses develop skills in interprofessional collaboration. This modular, team-based curriculum for early practitioners delivered training in the five following skill areas: listening for meaning, soliciting another's perspective, negotiating a transparent plan of care, attending to nonverbal communication and microaggression, and speaking up the hierarchy. Methods: We brought first-year medical and surgical residents and new nurses together for a 2-hour session monthly for 5 months. Each session began with an interactive large-group presentation, followed by small-group activities covering one of the five skill areas above, which had been identified as critical to interprofessional collaboration by national organizations. We measured relational coordination (RC), a validated measure of how well teams work together, before and after the curriculum was administered. We also obtained qualitative data from participant interviews and end-of-session evaluations. Results: Participants reported that the program helped them gain an understanding of each other's roles and workflow challenges. They felt that the curriculum allowed for the cultivation of professional relationships outside the clinical environment, which improved collegiality via gains in rapport and empathy towards each other. Nurses noted increased approachability of their physician colleagues after participation. RC scores improved for the entire cohort (p = .0232). Nurses had statistically higher RC gains than interns did (p = .0055). Discussion: Curriculum participants demonstrated improved RC scores and reported increased rapport with and empathy for each other. Curriculum development in this area is important because it may lead to better team-based patient care.

Revisiting Relational Coordination: A Systematic Review

“…Selection for teamwork has been studied only twice thus far and was positively associated with relational coordination in both the airline industry (Gittell, 2000) and the health care sector (Gittell et al, 2010). Training for teamwork has been studied multiple times, in the form of interprofessional team training in health care (Abu-Rish Blakeney et al, 2019;Brazil et al, 2019;Ross, 2015;Valenziano et al, 2018) and in medical education (Warde et al, 2014). While the above studies reported positive results of team training, a few reported null results (e.g., Raghav, 2018;Trojan et al, 2009).…”

Discharge Day: A Case-Based Interprofessional Exercise About Team Collaboration in Pediatrics

“…Our search for relevant literature yielded few resources for medical students in the clinical phase of their training that included a multidisciplinary component and in which the primary focus of the exercise was interprofessional collaboration in the context of pediatrics. Resources targeted to this learner population focused on teaching interprofessional communication skills or concepts more generally 9–11 or were targeted to specific clinical skills or acute scenarios, with a secondary emphasis on interprofessional collaboration. 12,13 For these reasons, we implemented a case-based exercise for medical students on their pediatrics core clerkship, as well as other health professions trainees, to explore interprofessional collaboration in the pediatrics context utilizing an interactive, discussion-based format.…”

Developing an interprofessional transition course to improve team-based HIV care for sub-Saharan Africa

“…3 University of Malawi, College of Nursing, Zomba, Malawi. 4 Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. 5 University of California, San Francisco, USA.…”

“…Despite advances made with programs such as MEPI and NEPI, gaps persist in the development of the health professional (HP) workforce in many SSA countries [ 3 ]. To bridge these gaps, SSA countries need to optimize the quality of health services delivered, recognize the synergy that effective team-based care affords, and support trainees in the vulnerable transition from school to practice, when habits in professional practice are first developed and mentorship is often lacking [ 4 , 5 ]. Investment in high-quality pre-service training is also motivated by the goals of achieving epidemiologic control and consolidating existing investments.…”