Interprofessional Education Integration and Expansion into Clinical and Community Experiences – UW-Madison Student Perspectives

The four core competencies of interprofessional collaborative practice are values and ethics, role and responsibilities, communication, and teamwork. Interprofessional practice and education (IPE) experiences often center around these competencies, particularly in clinical settings. As students in the inaugural UW-Madison IPE Path of Distinction (PoD) cohort, we aim to conduct a project focused on curriculum development to expand IPE integration into clinical and community experiences. This proposal is an integral part of our IPE PoD scholarly project requirement to implement, evaluate, and disseminate IPE work to advance the Quadruple Aim. We propose that future efforts to expand upon IPE experiences should explore how the core IPE competencies relate to the principles of health equity, cultural humility, and systems thinking.

The integration of these principles applies to both small- and large-scale IPE events. The expansion of IPE learning opportunities requires collaboration between students, educators, and community members. Regarding the principle of health equity, lPE events may benefit from mediated discussions about the history of IPE, implications of the Quadruple and Quintuple Aims for specific health disparities, and the varying effects of IPE within different health care professions and patient populations. Cultural humility should be consistently integrated into IPE learning by engaging patients and community leaders to prioritize culturally-specific care. Finally, IPE events should expand beyond purely clinical settings to include community-based outreach and preparedness efforts. This expansion requires an understanding of systems thinking to identify the boundaries of a given system, systems interactions, and leverage points for change.

We aim to develop opportunities to 1) Engage patient perspectives when creating potential case studies, 2) Expand our scope to include more experiences of family and caregivers, and 3) Assess the individual- and community-level impacts of IPE education. We will include opportunities to assess the success of these aims using pre/post analyses of learning outcomes amongst participants in the proposed IPE events. We will evaluate Aim 1 by comparing participants’ rated importance of patient perspectives and inclusive language. For Aim 2, we will assess how quickly and frequently participants identify family members or caregivers as key stakeholders in healthcare. We will measure Aim 3 by evaluating changes in participant understandings of the Social-Ecological Model and their ability to apply this model to different scenarios. This IPE expansion is well-positioned to improve the patient, population health, and care team-focused aspects of the Quadruple Aim and improve the general understanding of value within healthcare.