Resource Center

Fostering empathy in future health-care providers through service-learning is emerging as central to public health promotion. Patients fare better when their caregivers have higher relationship-centered characteristics such as the ones measured by the Jefferson Scale of Empathy. Unfortunately, these characteristics often deteriorate during health-care professional training. Nevertheless, growing literature documents how we can promote empathy, and other patient-centered characteristics, throughout health-care professional students’ undergraduate education.

Background: Empathy is a relevant clinical competence for nursing students. Involvement of expert patients in nursing education could help students develop their innate capacity to empathize. Objective: To evaluate the effect of expert-patient teaching on empathy development in nursing students. Methods: This randomized controlled trial was conducted among 144 first-year undergraduate nursing students divided into two equal groups.

Working effectively with other disciplines has become an important competency as a graduate attribute in higher
education institutions. Educational experiences should begin to foster the prerequisite competencies needed to
collaborate successfully with other healthcare professionals. The purpose of this study was to determine how
ready first year students are for interprofessional learning, and whether this readiness improves along the
continuum of learning into their final year of undergraduate studies. First year undergraduate students from ten

This article published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society discusses the transition of a required, in-person Interprofessional Longitudinal Clinical Experience (ICLE) curriculum to a virtual environment as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article published in Gerontology and Geriatrics Education discusses medical student geriatrics education using community-based volunteer older persons, known as a Senior Mentor Program (SMP). Though these programs have been described and evaluated against curriculum objectives, the full breadth of students’ learning from SMPs has not been reported. This study conducted a qualitative study using content analysis of reflections of Year 2 medical students submitted during a single visit home-based SMP.

This is a reflection-on-practice describing how an orofacial pathology interprofessional education (IPE) initiative was designed and implemented for undergraduate students in the discipline of dentistry, oral health and medical laboratory science. Six interprofessional competencies were used to guide the construction of teaching and learning resources.

The recent adoption of gerontology competencies for undergraduate and graduate education emphasize a need for competency-based education. This article from Gerontology & Geriatrics Education describes the approach one program took to mapping and aligning courses to the newly adopted Association for Gerontology in Higher Education's (AGHE) competencies in an effort to clarify curriculum needs for a diverse student population, increase the measurability of objectives, and apply for Program of Merit status through AGHE.

This article published in Gerontology & Geriatrics Education details a fall prevention interprofessional education (IPE) activity that uses the CDC's Stopping Elderly Accidents, Death & Injuries (STEADI) initiative to prepare health sciences students to manage older adult falls. The full article can be accessed with an OpenAthens account through your institution or with a Taylor & Francis Online account.

This article published in Gerontology & Geriatrics Education shares 15 years of experience developing a pedagogical strategy that situates the biology of aging as an accessible part of interdisciplinary gerontology education for nonbiologists and biologists alike. The approach hinges on a four-pronged learning opportunity--four course offerings--that places high priority on exactitude with language and sees development of an attitude of precision with language as essential to intellectual growth.

This article published in Gerontology & Geriatrics Education describes an interprofessional education (IPE) simulation-based geriatric palliative care training that was developed to educate health professions students in team communication. The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) competency-based framework was used to inform the training. An evaluation examined attitudes toward health care teams, self-efficacy in communication skills, interprofessional collaboration, and participant satisfaction with the training experience.