Christine
Kaunas,
Ed.D, MPH
Executive Director, Interprofessional Education & Research
Texas A&M Health
Christine Kaunas, EdD, MPH is the Executive Director for Interprofessional Education & Research at Texas A&M University Health. She provides leadership for interprofessional education (IPE) across the institution. Her work has focused on building infrastructure for and removing barriers to IPE, providing faculty development for IPE, and developing, implementing, and supporting interprofessional student learning. Dr. Kaunas’ research has focused on the relationship between institutional characteristics and IPE implementation. She is one of five founding members of the Texas Interprofessional Education Consortium, a Community of Practice engaged in elevating IPE across the state.
Presenting at the Nexus Summit:
The Texas IPE Consortium began in 2015, as a collaboration between the Texas state funded Academic Health Science Centers (HSC) including The University of Texas System, Texas Tech University, The University of North Texas, and Texas A&M. The Consortium’s purpose is to foster cross-institutional collaboration to expand learning opportunities and reinforce value for IPE as a critical aspect of health professions education. Consortium institutional membership has expanded to over thirty public and private institutional members state-wide and has attracted institutional members from states…
Interprofessional Education (IPE) facilitators are critical to the development of positive and collaborative learning experiences for students from different disciplines. These health professions educators require a broad range of interprofessional knowledge and skills for effective implementation, which usually necessitates a significant adjustment from uniprofessional content delivery. However, faculty development for IPE is often infrequent or lacks stadardization. Further, faculty efforts related to IPE often go unrecognized as they are rarely part of the evaluation, promotion, and tenure…
Values/Ethics for Interprofessional Practice is addressed less frequently in the published literature than the other IPEC Core Competencies of Roles and Responsibilities, Interprofessional Communication, and Teams and Teamwork. This may reflect a dearth of efforts to fully integrate this competency into interprofessional curricula. Such a deficiency is problematic in that managing complex ethical situations while maintaining mutual respect and common values is a substantial challenge, particularly across professions. To address this, an interprofessional team from medicine, nursing, pharmacy…