On Friday, March 25, IUPUC hosted an Interprofessional Education (IPE) day in the Columbus Learning Center which brought together 100 Franklin College and IUPUC health science students across multiple disciplines including nursing, mental health counseling, physician assistant studies, and athletic training studies. Sponsored by the East Indiana Area Health Education Center (EI-AHEC), the program is designed to help these students learn how collaboration across disciplines can positively impact patient outcomes.
The World Health Organization defines interprofessional education as students from two or more professions learning about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. Through interprofessional education, students learn to collaborate and communicate effectively, and, by doing so, develop leadership qualities and mutual respect for one another’s knowledge and skill sets.
As an organization, EI-AHEC works to make sure interprofessional education opportunities exist for students in health professions in the region both by supporting communication and collaboration between the various health professions college programs and by developing local-level interprofessional learning opportunities for students completing clinicals at hospitals and other sites that host students from multiple disciplines and programs.
“There is a body of research that suggests that healthcare professionals who communicate and collaborate in teams provide better outcomes for their patients,” said EI-AHEC Center Director, Jeff Hartz, who facilitated the event. “Because there isn’t just one health science university in south central Indiana where five or six or seven health professions train together, this type of community collaboration provides an important opportunity which students might not otherwise have.
During the half-day event, students were assigned to interprofessional teams led by faculty from both campuses, where they worked through a progressive case study involving a patient/client scenario that touched all student specialties (RN, APRN-FNP, PA, mental health counseling, and athletic training.
“Our goal is to always stay patient-centered, and interprofessional communication is a key to that,” said Jenny Ingle, Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of the Traditional and Accelerated BSN tracks at IUPUC. “The feedback we got from students was that they enjoyed the opportunity to work across disciplines and saw the value that this type of collaboration can have.”
Hartz points out that it was important to bring these students together face-to-face after several years of collaborating through distance learning. “For this cohort of students, even though they’ve been able to get their clinical training in person, the extra activities have gone away or been Zoom-based during Covid, so we built in extra time for sharing and interacting during IPE day which seems to have been well received and appreciated by this group of students.”
While this wasn’t the first IPE day facilitated by EI-AHEC, it has been a few years since the event has taken place in person, and Hartz hopes to build on the momentum and perhaps include other programs in the future. “IUPUC and Franklin College have participated for several years and we plan to continue that, but also look for opportunities to bring in students from other programs and disciplines like medical or pharmacy schools,” said Hartz.
For more information about EI-AHEC, visit eiahec.org.
Learn more about IPE day from this short video.