Medical student perceptions of an initial collaborative immersion experience.

Recent reviews of interprofessional education (IPE) highlight the need for innovative curricula focused on longitudinal clinical learning. We describe the development and early outcomes of the initial clinical experience (ICE), a longitudinal practice-based course for first-year medical students. While IPE courses focus on student-to-student interaction, ICE focuses on introducing students to interprofessional collaboration. Students attend 14 sessions at one of 18 different clinical sites. They work directly with different health professionals from among 17 possible professions, including nurses, pharmacists, social workers, and respiratory, occupational, and physical therapists. Between 2015 and 2016, 167 students completed the course, and 81 completed the end-of-course evaluation. Students agreed or strongly agreed that ICE meaningfully contributed to their understanding of healthcare teams and different professional roles (86%), improved their understanding of healthcare systems (84%), improved their ability to communicate with healthcare professionals (61%), and improved their ability to work on interprofessional teams (65%). Select themes from narrative comments suggest that clinical immersion improves understanding of professional roles, helps students understand their own future roles in healthcare teams, and increases awareness of and respect for other professionals, with the potential to change future practice. ICE may be a template for other schools wishing to expand their current educational offerings, by engaging learners in more authentic, longitudinal clinical experiences with practicing healthcare professionals.

The Interprofessional Clinical Experience: Introduction to Interprofessional Education Through Early Immersion in Health Care Teams.

INTRODUCTION: The ability to collaborate as a member of interprofessional teams is essential for patient care and a core competency for students in health professions education. We developed a yearlong course, the Interprofessional Clinical Experience (ICE), to introduce first-year medical students to team-based aspects of the health care environment and provide them with a foundation upon which later experiences can grow. METHODS: The course uses experiential learning and critical reflection through reflective writing to orient students to working with care teams. Students receive assessments from faculty and various health care professionals. The course requires students to describe the roles and responsibilities of a variety of health care professionals, utilize effective communication with other health professionals on health care teams, demonstrate the ability to work on an interprofessional team, and examine their own and others' perspectives by engaging in self-directed learning and reflective practice. RESULTS: Annual course evaluations revealed that the majority of students agreed or strongly agreed that ICE contributed to their understanding of the health care team's roles and improved their ability to communicate with health care professionals, their understanding of health care systems, and their ability to work on an interprofessional team. The course also provides curricular content for the newly implemented Liaison Committee for Medical Education's accreditation requirement on interprofessional collaborative skills. DISCUSSION: The first implementation of this resource demonstrated that students met the educational objectives of the ICE and gained a better sense of the health care system and teams.