Dr. David Irby of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), moderated the final panel of the Macy conference on interprofessional education (IPE) yesterday. The session featured four senior faculty whose experience and reflections helped define a key message coming from this week’s conference—that patient-centeredness is at the core of IPE.
Here are some of their reflections:
Molly Cooke, UCSF and president-elect of the American College of Physicians
Cooke reflected on her career and experience with providing care interprofessionally to suggest that interprofessional experiences may be most effective when the patient is set to benefit the most—and that IPE simply for its own sake might not be sufficient. “Why are we doing this?” she asked. “I think that is the core question. In my mind it’s about making patient care better and that’s the test we need to put our innovations to.”
Patricia Benner, UCSF School of Nursing (Emerita)
Benner suggested that the notion of professionalism in health professions needs to change, with greater emphasis on patient-centeredness: “One of the lessons…is that students like it if it’s about the patient. We need IPE to be a new paradigm of focus on the patient and a shared identity with a lot more mutual trust.”
Linda Headrick, University of Missouri-Columbia
Headrick noted that she has witnessed interprofessional tensions melt away when professionals come together around a patient and find that they need each other to achieve their shared goal of excellent care. She concluded that designing IPE in a way that puts patients at the center is therefore key. She emphasized that best practices need to be conceived as a way to integrate learning and learners at all levels, so that they are actively involved in both the delivery and improvement of care. “If we design best practices without the learners and try to add them in later,” she asked, “how is that going to work?”
Madeline Schmitt, University of Rochester (Emerita)
“We are in a time of majestic change,” Schmitt noted in her reflection. Continuing the theme of patient centeredness as the lynch-pin of IPE, Schmitt recalled a powerful memory from her training as a nurse, when a physician had taken note of her close communication with a patient and, valuing it as an enhancement to the care he could provide, invited her to see the patient with him. “I thought about care differently from that point on,” she said.