Virginia Commonwealth University a leader in inter-professional education designed to have multiple healthcare professionals work as a team and communicate effectively It takes the expertise of many different disciplines, such as physicians, nurses, pharmacists, care providers, technicians and more to come together and care for a single patient.
“Traditionally, we’ve trained disciplines separately and expected them to come together as a team once they are taking care of patients”, said Alan Dow MD Assistant VP of the VCU Health Sciences Center for Inter-professional Education and Collaborative Care. “What we are trying to do is take the idea of working together and bring it back into the classroom using ideas like simulation to unite and teach people how to work together as a team,” he said.
He said, “Some of the communication tools being used to train students in the healthcare setting are derived from military and aviation training. The idea is to enable people to transfer the information they understand as a group and then use the information to take care of patients.”
Dow said, “Another advantage in improving communications is to help students learn how to look at the patient more actively, Many times, doctors, nurses and techs are more focused on all the data, monitors, and the patient’s test results, and less on the patient.”
In another university program to emphasize collaborative learning, Vanderbilt University’s Program in Inter-professional Learning (VPIL) received $183,000 from a Baptist Healing Trust (BHT) grant to support team-based training called “Coaching for Compassionate Care”. BHT grant recipients include nonprofit organizations from 40 counties in middle Tennessee that focus on physical health, mental health, recovery from alcohol and drug abuse, or healing from abuse, neglect, and violence.
VPIL is a collaboration of the Vanderbilt Schools of Nursing and Medicine, the Lipscomb and Belmont Universities Colleges of Pharmacy, and Tennessee State University’s Master of Social Work program.
VPIL has placed 21 teams consisting of one student from each discipline into clinical settings where they focus on patient-centered care, learn more about health systems, and perform quality improvement projects. Through further support from BHT, the program will focus on teaching health coaching skills as one method of adding value to patient care.