Short-term service trips and the interprofessional team: a perspective from Honduras.

Short-term service trips from the USA annually spend over $250 million dollars to provide healthcare to individuals in developing nations. These trips often uniquely define goals as related to changes in the host population and overlook the valuable benefits potentially incurred by the trip volunteers. The Honduras Outreach Medical Brigada Relief Effort utilizes an interprofessional team approach to develop the dual goals of improving health and quality of life in host communities and improving interprofessional teamwork values and skills among participants. This article outlines details of this program, describes on-going evaluation work and discusses the interprofessional implications from this project.

The development of student-led interprofessional education and collaboration.

Prominent healthcare organizations have called upon the academic and health communities to utilize interprofessional education (IPE) and collaboration to meet the changing needs of patients worldwide. Two student-led initiatives have overcome the various barriers that have historically impeded IPE and have embraced the call to improve the health of local and international underserved patients. This short report describes these two organizations, the International Health Service Collaborative at the University of South Florida and the Inter Health Professionals Alliance at Virginia Commonwealth University, and aims to encourage emerging health professional students and educators to embrace student-led IPE.

Health disparities and underserved populations: a potential solution, medical school partnerships with free clinics to improve curriculum.

Health-care educators share the social responsibility to teach medical students about social determinants of health and health-care disparities and subsequently to encourage medical students to pursue residencies in primary care and medical practice in underserved communities. Free clinics provide care to underserved communities, yet collaborative partnerships with such organizations remain largely untapped by medical schools. Free clinics and medical schools in 10 US states demonstrate that such partnerships are geographically feasible and have the potential to mutually benefit both organizational types. As supported by prior research, students exposed to underserved populations may be more likely to pursue primary care fields and practice in underserved communities, improving health-care infrastructure.

Medical interpreters: improvements to address access, equity, and quality of care for limited-English-proficient patients.

Limited-English-proficient (LEP) patients in the United States experience a variety of health care disparities associated with language barriers, including reduced clinical encounter time and substandard medical treatment compared with their English-speaking counterparts. In most current U.S. health care settings, interpretation services are provided by personnel ranging from employed professional interpreters to untrained, ad hoc interpreters such as friends, family, or medical staff. Studies have demonstrated that untrained individuals commit many interpretation errors that may critically compromise patient safety and ultimately prove to be life-threatening. Despite documented risks, the U.S. health care system lacks a required standardized certification for medical interpreters. The authors propose that the standardization of medical interpreter training and certification would substantially reduce the barriers to equitable care experienced by LEP patients in the U.S. health care system, including the occurrence of preventable clinical errors. Recent efforts of the U.S. federal court system are cited as a successful and realistic example of how these goals may be achieved. As guided by the evolution of the federal court interpreting certification program, subsequent research will be required to demonstrate the improvements and challenges that would result from national certification standards and policy for medical interpreters. Research should examine cost-effectiveness and ensure that certified interpreting services are appropriately used by health care practitioners. Ongoing commitment is required from lawmakers, health care providers, and researchers to remove barriers to care and to demand that equity remain a consistent goal of our health care system.

Improving public health through student-led interprofessional extracurricular education and collaboration: a conceptual framework.

In the US, health care professionals are trained predominantly in uniprofessional settings independent of interprofessional education and collaboration. Yet, these professionals are tasked to work collaboratively as part of an interprofessional team in the practice environment to provide comprehensive care to complex patient populations. Although many advantages of interprofessional education have been cited in the literature, interprofessional education and collaboration present unique barriers that have challenged educators and practitioners for years. In spite of these impediments, one student-led organization has successfully implemented interprofessional education and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for successful implementation of interprofessional education and collaboration for other student organizations, as well as for faculty and administrators. Each member of the interprofessional team brings discipline-specific expertise, allowing for a diverse team to attend to the multidimensional health needs of individual patients. The interprofessional team must organize around a common goal and work collaboratively to optimize patient outcomes. Successful interdisciplinary endeavors must address issues related to role clarity and skills regarding teamwork, communication, and conflict resolution. This conceptual framework can serve as a guide for student and health care organizations, in addition to academic institutions to produce health care professionals equipped with interdisciplinary teamwork skills to meet the changing health care demands of the 21st century.