Interprofessional grant writing seminar for early career faculty in a small, isolated teaching center.

Small, isolated teaching centers have difficulty mentoring interprofessional junior faculty in research methods and grant writing. Peer mentoring programs for grant writing at larger institutions have been successful. In this short report, we describe our program that leveraged mentor experience using four framing seminars followed by project refinement in three-person peer groups and monthly mentored works in progress meetings. In its first year, ten faculty from medicine, psychology, and pharmacy completed the program and successfully obtained six funded grants. Five of the projects transitioned from single profession applications to interprofessional applications as participants connected and profession-specific expertise was identified. Refinements for future cohorts are discussed.

Primary care collaborative practice in quality improvement: Description of an interprofessional curriculum.

PURPOSE: An innovative quality improvement (QI)-focused interprofessional training curriculum for pharmacy residents and other healthcare trainees is described. SUMMARY: Effective interprofessional collaboration and the ability to carry out QI initiatives are important skills for all healthcare trainees to develop when they are in training. To cultivate those skills, in 2011 a Veterans Affairs medical center in Idaho implemented a unique yearlong interprofessional curriculum for healthcare trainees, including postgraduate year 1 (PGY1) and postgraduate year 2 (PGY2) pharmacy residents, physician trainees in internal medicine, nurses, and psychologists. The curriculum has both didactic and experiential components. After attending a series of 1-hour workshops early in the academic year, trainees are assigned to interprofessional teams and work for the remainder of the year to complete QI projects. Over 100 trainees have participated in the interprofessional QI curriculum, with the majority of trainee projects based in the primary care setting. Pharmacy residents were involved in 62% of the projects completed in the 6 academic years ending with the 2016-17 year. CONCLUSION: Establishing an interprofessional QI curriculum allowed pharmacy residents in PGY1 and PGY2 programs to collaborate with other members of the healthcare team. Benefits include QI skills development, a greater understanding of QI initiatives at the institution, stronger relationships with other healthcare trainees and mentors, and improvements to patient care and safety and facility performance.

Impact of a complex chronic care patient case conference on quality and utilization.

There is need for effective venues to allow teams to coordinate care for high-risk or high-need patients. In addition, health systems need to assess the impact of such approaches on outcomes related to chronic health conditions and patient utilization. We evaluate the clinical impact of a novel case conference involving colocated trainees and supervisors in an interprofessional academic primary care clinic. The study utilized a prospective cohort with control group. Intervention patients (N = 104) were matched with controls (N = 104) from the same provider's panel using propensity scores based on age, gender, risk predictors, and prior utilization patterns. Clinical outcomes and subsequent utilization patterns were compared prior to and up to 6 months following the conference. In terms of utilization, intervention patients demonstrated increased visits with primary care team members (p = .0002) compared with controls, without a corresponding increase in the number of primary care providers' visits. There was a trend towards decreased urgent care and emergency visits (p = .07) and a significant decrease in the rate of hospitalizations (p = .04). Patients with poorly-controlled hypertension saw significant decreases in mean systolic blood pressure from 167 to 146 mm Hg. However, there were no differences between the intervention and control groups. Intervention patients with diabetes demonstrated a nonsignificant trend towards decreased hemoglobin A1c from 9.8 to 9.4, when compared with controls. Interprofessional case conferences have potential to improve care coordination and may be associated with improved disease management, decreased unplanned care, and overall reduced hospitalizations.

Interprofessional case conference: impact on learner outcomes.

Transition to interprofessional team-based care is a quickly progressing healthcare model and requires changes in medical training approaches. The Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) has taken a lead role in creating such training experiences, one of which is the establishment of multiple Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPCE). These sites are tasked with developing teaching innovations to better facilitate interprofessional team-based care. The patient-aligned care team interprofessional care update (PACT-ICU) is an interprofessional workplace learning activity with the goals of simultaneously addressing educational and patient care needs. Participants of the PACT-ICU included trainees and faculty of a variety of medical disciplines (e.g., internal medicine, psychology, and pharmacy) involved in a training primary care clinic. Two medically complex patients were presented at each PACT-ICU conference with the purpose of creating a plan of care that maintained an interprofessional team-based approach. Following implementation of the PACT-ICU conference intervention, two primary outcomes were assessed. First, self-assessment of PACT-ICU attendee learner outcomes was measured using a brief questionnaire surveying knowledge gain as it related to increase in knowledge of other professions' capabilities, roles, and responsibilities. Secondly, trainee provider behavior change was evaluated by measuring number of "within PACT" consults before and after participating in PACT-ICU. There was a significant positive change in self-assessed knowledge along with an indication of trainee behavioral change, as measured by electronic medical record consult patterns. This study demonstrates that interprofessional case conferences involving trainees and staff from multiple professions can increase awareness of other professions roles in patient care as well as facilitate interprofessional collaboration.

The Foundations of interprofessional curriculum. Finding the right epistemology and learning theory for the task.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Introduction: Health professional education programs are currently focusing on interprofessional training. This can highlight differences between our professions in our learning theories and training assumptions. A standardized approach to picking a deliberate perspective from which to design specific interprofessional curricula may be useful. Discourses: This paper presents one such approach. It is based on a 3 X 3 matrix developed by interprofessional faculty over seven years of team-based clinical training. To use this matrix, a deliberate epistemology (e.g., reductionist, constructivist, or complexity) and a learning theory (competency-based education, clinical reasoning, and situated learning) are chosen based on the goals of training, the context, and the developmental stage of the learners. Application: Each element in the matrix then provides a focused set of considerations for designing and assessing interprofessional curriculum. In addition, this matrix provides a framework for incorporating other epistemologies and learning theories. Conclusions: As professionals, we have been enculturated to see health education from a single perspective. A wider, structured approach to adopting learning assumptions and theories may better match the interprofessional training tasks we are being asked to design.