The National Center team is on the road nearly every week, connecting with colleagues in health professions education and practice all over the country.  These connections help the team learn from many diverse activities to inform the center’s work.

This week, center director Barbara Brandt was a featured speaker in a statewide “courageous conversation” about the Nexus and the Triple Aim in Oacoma, S.D. The South Dakota Summit on Interprofessional Education was designed to develop a collaborative action plan—engaging the state’s higher education and health systems—for educating health professionals who are prepared to focus on the Triple Aim of better care, lower costs and improved population health. “The students and young professionals inspired me!” said Brandt. “They are champions of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Open School modules and have mapped courses throughout South Dakota to the IPEC and American Council on Graduate Medical Education competencies.  At one point, one student said to me: ‘We’ve had the spark, but this meeting will be the accelerant for interprofessional education and collaborative practice.’”

Last week, Minnesota Nexus team leader Brian Sick, a medicine-pediatrics specialist, spoke about interprofessional practice and education at the annual symposium of the National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health (NIIOH) in Cape Cod, Mass. “Oral health can serve as an exemplar of interprofessional practice and education because it really can involve all professions,” Sick observed. “But most professions are trained to basically skip the mouth in their physical exams and discussions with patients. One thing I took away was the need to ‘bring the mouth back into the body.’” The NIIOH offers an online curriculum for integrating oral and general health called Smiles for Life, which is gaining momentum in universities across the country.

And last Friday, National Center team member Janet Shanedling also joined the NIIOH in Aspen, Colo., at the annual Physician Assistants Leadership Summit on Oral Health. The summit celebrated accomplishments of the past year while developing a network of leaders committed to a shared goal of eradicating dental disease. Shanedling shared: “This is an unbelievable group! If you want to see the Nexus in operation, here it is.” The summit was co-sponsored by the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants.

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