Resource Center

BACKGROUND: Nearly all health professional students and prescribers, regardless of specialty, will care for older adults who are enrolled in or eligible for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Given the growing numbers of older adults, the increased burden of chronic disease, and the escalating costs of health care, health professional students and prescribers across disciplines should learn strategies to promote cost-effective prescribing and collaborate with pharmacists who are experts in medication use and costs.

There is a widening gap between the health care needs of older persons and the treatment skills of the health care professionals who serve them. This gap is especially severe in rural areas, where there is a shortage of and inadequate collaboration between health care professionals and poor access to services for older persons.

With the growing interest in interprofessional education and practice, methods to evaluate the effectiveness of related curricular activities are essential. The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to assess the attitudes of students in medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, and physical therapy toward interprofessional education using the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale and Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale and (2) to compare data with normative data previously reported.

Teamwork and the interprofessional collaboration of all health professions are a guarantee of patient safety and highly qualified treatment in patient care. In the daily clinical routine, physicians and nurses must work together, but the education of the different health professions occurs separately in various places, mostly without interrelated contact. Such training abets mutual misunderstanding and cements professional protectionism, which is why interprofessional education can play an important role in dismantling such barriers to future cooperation.

The need for osteopathic geriatric academic leaders who are educators and researchers is well recognized. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-School of Osteopathic Medicine's Geriatric Residency program, a federally funded Faculty Training Project in Geriatric Medicine and Dentistry, has served as a model program in the osteopathic medical profession since its inception in 1989.

Medicare requires all hospice agencies to conduct regular interdisciplinary team meetings to facilitate collaboration within the team and to coordinate holistic plans of patient care. This study takes a preliminary look at hospice agencies' preparation of interdisciplinary team members for collaboration within team meetings and aims to explain hospices' strategies for training and assessing the collaborative strength of interdisciplinary team meetings.

The Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) has become the criterion standard for the assessment of clinical competence in undergraduate and postgraduate medical and other health professional programs.

BACKGROUND: A modified nontechnical skills (NOTECHS) scale for trauma (T-NOTECHS) was developed to teach and assess teamwork skills of multidisciplinary trauma resuscitation teams. In this study, T-NOTECHS was evaluated for reliability and correlation with clinical performance.
METHODS: Interrater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient) and correlation with the speed and completeness of resuscitation tasks were assessed during simulation-based teamwork training and during actual trauma resuscitations.

PURPOSE: Understanding the transformation of primary care practices to patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs) requires making sense of the change process, multilevel outcomes, and context. We describe the methods used to evaluate the country's first national demonstration project of the PCMH concept, with an emphasis on the quantitative measures and lessons for multimethod evaluation approaches.

The Teamwork – Knowledge, Skills, and Ability (KSA) Test was developed by Stevens and Campion to operationalize their comprehensive taxonomy of teamwork competencies. The test is generally considered ‘valid’ and has been used frequently in organizations. Our review of the literature found an average criterion validity of.20 for the Teamwork-KSA Test, although there was considerable variability across studies. We could find no research on the item properties, factor structure, or subscale reliabilities, and no extensive investigations of the nomological net of this test.