U-M Team Receives Award for Interprofessional Education Foundations Experience

“This award reflects the quality of University of Michigan faculty who are involved in our interprofessional education (IPE) efforts,” said Frank Ascione, Director of the Michigan Center for IPE, who nominated the 11-member U-M IPE Foundations Experience Team for the 2019 Midwest Interprofessional Practice, Education, and Research Center (MIPERC) Demonstration Model Award. “It also symbolizes our emphasis on innovative solutions to teaching IPE principles to our large and diverse group of health science students,” he said.

UM-Flint Associate Professor Laura Smith, PhD, DPT, is the lead faculty member of IPE foundational programs at U-M. The rest of the award-winning team, representing U-M health science schools and centers that are integral to this IPE initiative, includes: Melissa Gross (Kinesiology), Olivia Anderson (Public Health), Karen Farris (Pharmacy), Mark Fitzgerald (Dentistry), Debbie Mattison (Social Work), Laurel Moore (Medical School), Peggy Ursuy (Nursing), Tazin Daniels (Center for Research on Teaching and Learning), Ghaidaa Najjar and Vani Patterson (Michigan Center for IPE).

The multifaceted U-M IPE foundational experience is scalable and overcomes challenges of time and place across U-M’s three campuses (Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn). It incorporates asynchronous instruction and interprofessional interaction (the faculty-directed online Introduction IPE Module) along with synchronous classroom intraprofessional discussion. This activity is followed by a large face-to-face event in October called IPE in Action, in which teams of students from different professions discuss a complex patient case at tables with a faculty member. Each of these two instructional activities involve well over a thousand students and dozens of faculty. IPE in Action is believed to be the largest gathering of faculty and students in the same spot at U-M; it is held in Crisler basketball arena.

The foundations program provides health professions students with their first formal IPE exposure, introducing them to the competencies needed to practice collaboratively in clinical and community settings. Preliminary analysis indicates that students’ knowledge and attitudes across schools and for each school individually improved significantly for the key IPE domains (roles/responsibilities, teams/teamwork, and patient-centered care) after completing the online module and participating in the face-to-face event.

MIPERC criteria for its Demonstration Model Award includes: “The team must be actively contributing toward the mission of Interprofessional education and demonstrate leadership qualities that promote the importance of interprofessional collaborative practice concepts to both/either/or students and peers.”

Website: https://interprofessional.umich.edu/