Interprofessional Education
The Interprofessional Education Program
Interprofessional education events have been held annually at the University of Arizona for many years. At the Arizona Health Sciences Center (AHSC), these events include students from the colleges of nursing, medicine, pharmacy and public health. They routinely incorporate students from the UA College of Law and the Arizona State University College of Social Work, as well.
Interprofessional education events are designed to help students better understand the other professions and to develop positive teamwork skills that can improve patient safety and the quality of the healthcare experience for patients and professionals. The Institute of Medicine (Dean J. Lyle Bootman is one of the members) issued a report that called for transformation of the health education system toward interprofessional education. This has led all of the ASHC colleges to make interprofessional education and practice their first priority in the most recent strategic plan. Students will see even more interprofessional activities in the near future.
View a video about interprofessional education at the Arizona Health Sciences Center here:
Download Video: Apple iTunes 'MP4' | Open Format 'OGG'
For more information about interprofessional education at the Tucson location of the College of Pharmacy, contact John Murphy, associate dean.
Download this document for the core competencies expected in interprofessional collaborative practice.
For more information about the university's Interprofessional Education and Practice programs, visit the IPEP website.
Interprofessional Education Events
There are at least four major interprofessional education events each year that engage up to 550 students at a time. The event for first-year students relates to communication and culture, while later-year students engage in a mock disaster drill (using a pandemic influenza outbreak as the example), a session on understanding the intricacies of providing healthcare to individuals with disabilities, and another focused on teamwork during a medical emergency requiring CPR.
Each of these is designed to allow students to examine the roles of the other health professionals and explore how their own profession fits within the overall team.
Hundreds of faculty and staff support the development and delivery of the interprofessional education events and thousands of hours go into ensuring that they are valuable experiences for the students. After each event, the planners examine feedback from students and facilitators in order to improve the next ones.
View a story, photos and video about a 2012 interprofessional education event here.
Interprofessional Education at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus
Interprofessional education is a major emphasis at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus. Although the pharmacy college does not have full-time students in Phoenix yet, nearly half of the college's PharmD students select one or more clinical clerkship rotations in Phoenix, and some choose all of their fourth-year rotations in Phoenix.
Two initiatives support interprofessional education in Phoenix: the Macy Foundation-funded project and the Interprofessional Design Team.
The Macy Foundation-funded project is an initiative to develop an integrated core curriculum to prepare primary care nurse practitioners, physicians and pharmacists to work closely together to serve the needs of rural and underserved areas in Arizona and the United States.
The Interprofessional Design Team is comprised of representatives from the UA colleges of medicine and pharmacy and the Arizona State University colleges of nursing, social work and nutrition. This team plans interprofessional experiences for students in the represented healthcare disciplines. As the work of the Macy Foundation-funded project continues, students from nursing, medicine, and pharmacy will become increasingly involved in helping to develop and evaluate the proposed integrated core curriculum.
For more information about interprofessional education at the Phoenix location of the College of Pharmacy, contact Philip Schneider, associate dean.
