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Nurses and other health professionals are required to demonstrate broad levels of expertise and service to ensure quality patient-centred health care. Interprofessional practice aligned with interprofessional education (IPE) has been promoted as a vehicle to promote broad levels of expertise. However, challenges remain for universities and other higher education institutions to successfully provide IPE opportunities for students. This paper presents perceptions of academic staff towards IPE from one Australian multi-campus health faculty.

BACKGROUND: Inadequate supervision is a significant contributing factor to medical errors involving trainees, but supervision in high-risk settings such as the intensive care unit (ICU) is not well studied.

OBJECTIVE: We explored how residents in the ICU experienced supervision related to medication safety, not only from supervising physicians but also from other professionals.

This column describes an approach to sustaining interprofessional education for perioperative staff when budgetary cuts in professional education significantly limit professional development.

Copyright 2012, SLACK Incorporated.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22214413

An interprofessional clinical learning experience was developed for pre-licensure occupational therapy (OT) and psychology graduate students. Students worked in interprofessional teams to plan and implement a social skills training program for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The objectives were to provide a hands-on, student-led clinical experience; facilitate interprofessional collaborative learning through leadership partnerships and teach children with ASD to engage in appropriate social skill behaviors.

OBJECTIVE AND PARTICIPANTS: This program provides an interprofessional course to students, allowing them to learn together with each other and their elder teachers.

GOALS: include refining their professional parameters (turf), learning how to successfully collaborate with other professionals (team), and determining how to effectively design intervention plans for elders within their own communities (town). Various methods of evaluation, such as journals, participation in rounds, and OSCEs, used to assess students' status are described.

The Contextual Activity Sampling System (CASS) is a novel methodology designed for collecting data of on-going learning experiences through frequent sampling by using mobile phones. This paper describes how it for the first time has been introduced to clinical learning environments. The purposes of this study were to cross-culturally adapt the CASS tool and questionnaire for use in clinical learning environments, investigate whether the methodology is suitable for collecting data and how it is experienced by students.

An effective interprofessional medical team can efficiently coordinate health care providers to achieve the collective outcome of improving each patient's health. To determine how current teams function, four groups of business students independently observed interprofessional work rounds on four different internal medicine services in a typical academic hospital and also interviewed the participants. In all instances, caregivers had formed working groups rather than working teams.

The education of health professions students is rooted historically in time-honored and silo-bound traditions of pedagogy and content not easily influenced by outside forces. However, the quality chasm work of the Institute of Medicine, Institute of Healthcare Improvement, Quality and Safety Education for Nurses, and other groups has led to a remarkable willingness to change at one academic health sciences university. This article describes one university's strategies, challenges, and successes in delivering interprofessional educational programs.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) is planning interprofessional training in electronic health records (EHRs) and medical informatics. Training will be integrated throughout the curricula and will include seminars on broad concepts supplemented with online modules, didactic lectures, and hands-on experiences.

A leadership conference titled "Have Patient Safety and the Workforce Shortage Created the Perfect Storm?" was held in honor of Dr. Ada Sue Hinshaw, who was ending her tenure as dean of the University of Michigan School of Nursing. A morning panel on the preferred future for practice featured plenary speaker Dr. Linda Burnes Bolton and participating panelists Dr. Sanjay Saint, Dr. Jane Barnsteiner, and Dr. Joanne Disch. Each speaker presented a unique yet complementary perspective, with several common themes permeating the morning's presentations.