Pivoting IPE from the Care Team to the Social Determinants of Health: Lessons from a Large Scale Early Learner IPE Course in Addressing Health Equity, Racism and Bias

Overview: This seminar uses active learning tools to explore the profound curricular design challenges involved in pivoting existing interprofessional education (IPE) curriculum to address health equity, racism and bias. This seminar leverages the experience of the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in pivoting its large-scale, early learner course, “Foundations of Interprofessional Collaborative Practice” (FICP), from a focus on the clinical team toward a focus on the social determinants of health (SDOH), and by directly addressing health equity, racism and bias.

Learning Objectives: After attending this seminar, participants will:

1. Understand opportunities and challenges UIC faced in executing this pivot;
2. Examine the conceptual framework that UIC used to guide this work; and,
3. Develop knowledge and skills to execute similar efforts at home.

The Pivot: The seminar will be built around the pivot of FICP, the default early learner IPE course for UIC’s 13 health professions, which enrolls over 1300 students and over 100 facilitators annually. FICP’s practice focus is chronic pain, and original course content focused on clinician roles and responsibilities, team dynamics, and communication. While the original course was very well received it had three significant gaps:

1. Align with UIC’s Mission: The content did not align well with UIC’s IPE mission “to create transformational change in health professions education… with focused attention to the pressing needs of underserved individuals and populations”.

2. Reflect UIC’s Patient Population: The content did not reflect the patient population of UIC’s Health System which serves, in part, as a safety-net provider for a patient population that is predominantly African American and faces some of the worst SDOH in the country.

3. Engage UIC’s Diverse Health Professions: The content did not allow adequate engagement of non-clinical UIC professions, e.g. public health, health informatics, and health administration.

In response to the need to realign FICP to meet these needs, UIC has been on a three year journey to pivot this massive early learner IPE course to ensure that it focuses on the SDOH and directly addresses health equity, racism and bias.

The Conceptual Framework: The seminar explores the framework that UIC has used to guide the pivot of FICP, developed by Barbara Brandt and others, and which expands the view of the interprofessional health team “beyond individual clinical encounters and breaching the walls of health care systems out into communities where people live…” shifting “from the predominant focus on clinical care to close the gap of health equity”, and which captures the convergence between “value-based payment models and … a focus on the Social Determinants of Health and health equity.” (Brandt et al,“Social Determinants of Health - Nursing, Health Professions and Interprofessional Education at a Crossroads”, 2020)

Active Learning Tools: The seminar will lead participants through these two content areas using a combination of short lectures and active learning tools such as Pair-Share, Buzz Groups, and others to maximize engagement and learning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Center for Faculty Excellence, “Classroom Activities for Active Learning”, 2009).