In the fall I had the opportunity to visit two of our grantees and see firsthand the work they are doing to advance interprofessional education (IPE). Their efforts reflect the tremendous progress Macy grantees are making in translating IPE from theory into practice.
First I visited the University of Colorado at Denver’s Anschutz Medical Campus. Anschutz brings together schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dental medicine, and public health in one integrated campus. Even so, when the Anchutz team, led by Mark Earnest, MD, PhD, began its work, the existing IPE curriculum had limited reach. Weaving shared curricular elements throughout the training of all its health profession students became their goal, and project REACH—Realizing Educational Advancement for Collaborative Health—was born. Today, the training programs developed as part of REACH, including an interprofessional clinical rotations program, have extended interprofessional education to nearly every student. Read more about Anschutz’s work and grant here.
My second visit was to the Arizona State University College of Nursing & Health Innovation and the University of Arizona College of Medicine and Pharmacy Nursing & Health Innovation, which in 2010 joined together to create an integrated interprofessional curriculum model. These schools are focused on preparing physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists for primary care practice in rural and underserved areas. You can read more about the Arizona collaboration here.
Faculty and staff at the Arizona schools have worked together to identify common competencies across the health professions they teach, are designing curricula to meet the interprofessional care needs of the underserved, and are planning regular interactions between students from the different professional programs, giving them an opportunity to learn together and collaborate. They are in the second year of a planning grant, and I witnessed the development of an exciting curriculum that will train health professionals to deliver interprofessional care that meets needs of rural and underserved populations. It was thrilling.
Interprofessional education has been discussed for more than 40 years but now, in these schools, it is becoming real. With all the doubts and fears about the future of our health system that appear daily in the media, it is heartening and even exciting to see health professions schools stepping up to the plate to offer bold examples of educational change that will help meet the healthcare needs of the public now and in decades to come.