In keeping with the College’s commitment to scholarship, innovation and continuous improvement, we develop initiatives aimed at fostering shared learning experiences for medical students and other health professionals and assess and evaluate these initiatives for their effectiveness. Our faculty members publish their assessments of our programs in peer-reviewed publications.
IPE-Related Publications
Twelve Tips for Curriculum Sharing and Implementation: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Explores how two Texas medical students partnered around two best practices and successfully shared, adapted and then implemented them. Practice one is a workshop that targets implicit bias in healthcare and how it impacts patient care. Practice two is a large scale, mass casualty simulation that capitalizes on interprofessional team delivery of healthcare.
In this year-long course, medical students participate in a clinical home visit experience with pharmacy students and a geriatrician or geriatric nurse practitioner. This study was the first to demonstrate that the setting of the experience is at least as important and may be more important than length of interaction, types of faculty involved, level of learners and preparation for all parties in the design of IP experiences.
Patient Safety Interprofessional Training for Medical, Nursing and Pharmacy Students
Students participate in a 1.5-hour large-group activity that explores a case from the perspective of each discipline. Faculty from all three disciplines sequentially present and debrief the case using focus questions to guide students’ reflections and interactions between team members. This study demonstrated that this interprofessional educational offering is effective in terms of increasing awareness and knowledge among members of three healthcare disciplines, improving awareness of potential kinds of communications errors, and helping students consider the role of interdisciplinary interactions.
Medical students, pharmacy students and nursing students work in teams to disclose a medical error to a standardized patient. The activity begins with an icebreaker experience wherein students learn about each other. Next each team plans a strategy for error disclosure and collaboratively disclose the error. Standardize patients evaluate the team’s performance and students regroup for a debriefing. This study showed that the activity enables collaborative problem solving. The debriefing discussion broadens students’ understanding of the expertise of the other disciplines and promoted shared accountability. Students found this activity engaging and effective.
Changes in Pharmacy Students After Experiencing Interprofessional Education Activities
This study assessed the impact of IPE experiences on pharmacy students’ perceived level of comfort with and level of reliability regarding other healthcare professionals. Students in the study participated in the No Place Like Home Clinical Visit with BCM medical students and/or an interprofessional simulation experience with BCM medical students and nursing students from Texas Woman’s University. Pharmacy students who experienced any IPE perceived themselves as more comfortable with questioning and being questioned by other healthcare professionals than students without IPE.