Resource Center

As National Center ramps up its work to demonstrate the value of team care and education, it is essential to engage the expertise and insights of public health professionals to ensure preventing disease and treating disease are considered together to improve health in our communities.

Evaluating team-based care and education initiatives based on data—not on opinion—is core to National Center’s mission and success. To that end, a data repository is being created to house both quantitative and qualitative information about team-based educational programs and care programs.

Sean Lind, MA, MLIS, of Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, has been named National Center’s first Resource Exchange program manager. In this role, Lind will lead strategies to expand Resource Exchange content and use, manage and curate content, build relationships with key stakeholders, respond to user needs and develop new capabilities for the repository.

You have all heard me talk about—and write about—my travels over the last 15 months. You have listened to my stories about successful programs, heard me report about what’s working and what’s not working as well, and helped me start to shape this fledgling organization. I have listened to what you have said and acted on your very good advice.

Health care systems all over the world recognize the need for team-based, collaborative care. Interprofessional teams are able to provide high quality, effective, efficient care when they have the information and tools to support shared decision making. Informatics is the scientific field that helps health care teams use data, information and knowledge to improve health care and the public’s health.

The National Center is pleased to co-sponsor two free online courses on the topic of informatics.

Families, Systems & Health will devote an upcoming issue to teamwork in health care. The journal aims to foster new knowledge relevant to “a systemic approach to healthcare that integrates mind and body; individual and family; and communities, clinicians, and health systems while considering cost-effectiveness and distributive justice.” Relevant submissions could address training of health care teams, team leadership models, team science, and the impact of teamwork on patient, staff, health care quality, equity and financial outcomes.  

With the start of a new year, I’ve been both reflecting on what the National Center has accomplished and looking toward the future. I want to invite you to review the update I recently published in the Journal of Interprofessional Care, where I shared our thinking about the need for a new Nexus of practice and education, our focus on large-scale systems transformation, the center’s research agenda, and an invitation to help us achieve our vision.

One of the goals of the National Center is to foster high quality interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) research, and the importance of using the highest quality instruments available in doing so cannot be overstated. Our evaluation team recently completed an initial review of the IPECP literature, which resulted in the 26 instrument descriptions now available in a special collection within the National Center’s Resource Exchange. 

At a glance: National Center measurement instrument collection 

We know where we’re going (better care, lower costs and better health) and we know we’re going to get there by aligning interprofessional education with health system redesign in a new Nexus. But how will we know when we arrive?

The Minnesota Nexus – What’s it about? Why should we care?

Barbara Brandt, PhD, National Center director and associate vice president for education, University of Minnesota Academic Health Center

Next Tuesday, January 7, we will meet for the first time to kick off what we are now calling the “Minnesota Nexus."  I thank you for agreeing to serve on this group for what the Academic Health Center considers to be a significant opportunity.  So, what is it? And why should we care?  Let me give you some background.