In January, 2012, the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) and the National League for Nursing, with support from the Macy Foundation, convened two simultaneous meetings on Interprofessional Education and Simulation just prior to the start of the annual 4 day International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, which this year was in San Diego, CA.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is extremely important to support the development of effective and efficiently functioning health care teams to deliver the increasingly complex care that is being required by patients in the 21st century. Simulation is a tool that can be used to support interprofessional education and the development of effective teams.
The simultaneous meetings had partially overlapping sessions. One was designed to educate its attendees about the principles of interprofessional education and the roles that simulation could play as a tool to support it. It drew over 450 persons, a significant percentage of the 2500 registrants who attended SSH’s annual meeting. The second meeting was invitational. It drew representatives of 22 organizations who after attending the opening session of the educational meeting, worked separately to design a set of next steps for fostering better interprofessional education including the use of simulation as a tool. The initial results of the invitational discussions were presented at the end of the educational meeting.
The educational meeting covered a lot of territory including the Core Competencies for Interprofessional Education that were promulgated in May, 2010 by the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) . It emphasized the roles that simulation, including the use of standardized patients as well as a variety of mechanical and computerized educational settings and programs, could play in helping learners in a variety of health professions (e.g., medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, allied health professions) to acquire the core competencies.
The organizations that participated in the invitational meeting included representation for patients, the Joint Commission, and a variety of professional organizations involved in education and health care delivery (e.g., organizations such as the Association of American Medical Colleges, Association of Allied Health Professions, American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, American Nurses Association, American Society of Anesthesiologists, etc). The 22 participating organizations agreed to promote IPE and simulation as a tool for achieving better interprofessional practice; develop a common core message and use existing sources such as IPEC’s core competencies in disseminating their message to their spheres of influence. The discussions were wide-ranging and in addition to use of simulation as a tool covered faculty development issues, common and accessible resources (e.g., the IPE central repository/portal that the Association of American Medical Colleges is developing under a new grant from the Macy Foundation) , development and sharing of evaluation tools, and identifying research needs. As a result of the Macy Foundation grant in support of the meeting, the findings of the discussion and conclusions of the 22 participating organizations are now being developed into a White Paper that can be disseminated by each participant including the Macy Foundation.