School of Pharmacy

College of Health Sciences

Pharmacy Students Participate in Interprofessional Education Activities

Pharmacy students participate in an interprofessional activity during the Drug Use Process course in the spring of their first year. Now, students can have a second IPE experience in their second year as well.

Cheri Bellamy	Janelle Krueger

PHCY 6270, Intermediate Pharmacy Practicum, is an experiential course for P2 students which focuses on clinical skill building and the geriatric population. Two years ago Janelle Krueger, who teaches PHCY 6270 and Cheri Bellamy, who teaches N3842 Care of the Older Adult for junior nursing students, discovered that they both taught courses which focused on caring for older adults and involved some student exposure to the long-term care setting. With the College of Health Sciences encouraging more interprofessional opportunities for students, they looked for ways to work together and connect their students around the common theme of geriatrics.

They started small in the first year by having a facilitated reflective session for the combined courses at the end of the semester focusing globally on the care provided in the long-term care setting. Pharmacy student feedback indicated a desire to have more time with the nursing students or opportunities to work on something together versus a facilitated discussion.

In year two, Krueger and Bellamy took this feedback to expand the interactions the students had with one another. In the second half of the semester (after students had completed much of their respective patient care experiences), students were divided into small groups containing both disciplines. Students then participated in a 3-week IPE experience. Since students did not have common class time, they introduced themselves to group members online using prompted questions. In week two, group members participated in an online threaded discussion responding to a variety of reflective questions relating to the care of the older adult (e.g. pros/cons of working with older adults, barriers to providing optimal care in the nursing home setting, how they anticipate interfacing with the other discipline in the nursing home setting). The IPE activity culminated in a collaborative case study where groups met in person to solve a geriatric case. Students worked on the case independently and then met with their team to finalize how they would provide an interprofessional care plan for the patient.

From the instructors’ perspective this expanded model was much more valuable and successful. It was exciting to see how eager the students were to apply their own disciplines knowledge to solve the case. The case was challenging and mimicked the real life complexities of a geriatric patient with multiple health problems. Students embraced this challenge and worked diligently together to create a plan for the patient. The instructors were both very proud of what the teams accomplished.

Core competencies that were addressed in this IPE include:

• Values and Ethics for Interprofessional Practice Values and Ethics for Interprofessional Practice
  • VE4—Respect the unique culture, values roles and responsibilities and expertise of other health professions
• Roles and Responsibilities
  • RR4—explain the roles and responsibilities of other care providers and how the team works together to provide care
  • RR9—Use unique and complementary abilities of all members of the team to optimize patient care
• Team and Teamwork
  • TT4—Integrate the knowledge and experience of other professions—appropriate to the specific care situation—to inform care decisions while respecting patient and community values and priorities/preferences for care
• Interprofessional Communication
  • CC4—Listen actively and encourage ideas and opinions of other team members

Carol Kobulnicky, Director of Interprofessional Education for the College of Health Sciences says "We're taking an embedded approach of infusing IPE into our existing PharmD curricula through specific assignments involving students from other professional disciplines.  I'm excited to see Profs. Krueger and Bellamy working on this together as one of our newer IPE Faculty Teams.  They've done a great job and I'm eager to see how we can learn from and, where possible, replicate their model."

The WHO Study Group on Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice, 2010 defines IPE as a situation where "students from two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes."