Promoting interprofessional learning with medical students in home care settings

Abstract

Background: The home care setting is ideal for medical students to learn about the importance of interprofessional collaboration in the community. Aims: This project examined the impact of a unique program designed to facilitate medical students' knowledge and awareness of the challenges of interprofessional care in the home. Methods: In pairs, medical students participated in two community visits with preceptors from different professions. Students completed a structured personal reflection after their first visit. Students and preceptors participated in focus groups or interviews to identify strengths and challenges of the experiences. The structured reflections and the focus group and interview transcripts were analyzed qualitatively. Results: 164 medical students and 36 preceptors participated in 326 visits. There were high ratings of satisfaction from students and preceptors. Students developed unexpected insights into peoples' lives, developed a greater understanding of the patient's perspective and determinants of health, learned about others' scope of practice, and developed an appreciation of the limitations of their own scope of practice. Preceptors had high expectations for student performance and engagement and enjoyed the opportunity to impart their knowledge to future physicians. Conclusion: Although organizationally complex, the program evaluation suggestions that students and preceptors benefit from interprofessional experiences in the home.

Assessing Competences in Medical Students with a Newly Designed 360- Degree Examination of a Simulated First Day of Residency: A Feasibility Study

“…Furthermore, medical students should be given the opportunity to assess their clinical competences longitudinally during their undergraduate studies to prepare for such an assessment [34]. Additionally, interprofessional learning should be integrated further in undergraduate medical education [35] and assessment [36] to accustom medical students to the interprofessional exchange, which they will experience in their daily work as residents and which they encountered as a disturbance in their patient workup in our assessment.…”

Getting Out of Silos: An Innovative Transitional Care Curriculum for Internal Medicine Residents Through Experiential Interdisciplinary Learning

“…26 Published transitional care curricula in internal medicine and family medicine rarely describe use of experiential learning (eg, direct patient contact, real-life experience with different care systems and disciplines) in diverse care systems, 10,[28][29][30][31][32] whereas residency curricula in home or nursing home settings or interdisciplinary teams do not focus on transitional care. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] For example, nursing home curricula do not focus on how the complex care structure of postacute care affects transitions, or how transitional care to and from the nursing home can be optimized at an individual patient and system level. 20,21,24 Our curriculum addresses this gap by providing exposure to the continuum of care that patients experience.…”

“…10 Other curricula involve different care settings or interdisciplinary teams but do not focus on transitional care. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] We describe a curriculum to teach internal medicine residents to provide better transitional care at hospital discharge through experiential learning in different care settings outside of the acute hospital with a focus on other health care disciplines involved in care transitions.…”

Importance of Interprofessional Education in Occupational Therapy Curricula

“…Ultimately, IPE aims to create more effective systems of interprofessional practice, defined as a higher form of practice wherein health care professionals from different disciplines make up a team, unique to the individual client-patient, that works with the client to develop a unified decision (National Academies of Practice, 2012). IPP results in safer and more efficient delivery of health care (Guitard, Dubouloz, Savard, Metthé, & Brasset-Latulippe, 2010) as well as greater patient satisfaction (Howell, Wittman, & Bundy, 2012;Kent & Keating, 2013;Shiyanbola, Lammers, Randall, & Richards, 2012;Solomon & Risdon, 2011), thus validating the need to embed IPE into entry-level preparation for occupational therapy practitioners.…”