Catalyst Awards

The Clinical Teaming Project (CTP) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and MetroHealth involves residents, fellows, and attending physicians co-creating a teamwork curriculum, which will be used to teach residents and fellows how to achieve excellent patient care through interprofessional collaboration and shared accountability. Representatives from residency and fellowship programs will also attend train-the-trainer sessions, provided by the CWRU Office of Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Education and Research, where they will learn how to teach the teaming modules and then partner with program directors, chief residents, and other departmental leaders to implement and evaluate the teaming curriculum. The curriculum will be customized to address time constraints, competing demands, and other unique factors that busy residents and fellows experience in the clinical learning environment.

PIs: Tyler Reimschisel, MD, MHPE, Associate Provost, Interprofessional & Interdisciplinary Education & Research and Professor of Genetics & Genome Sciences; Kaitlyn Murphy, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, CWRU

Medical learners with disabilities encounter discrimination and other barriers during residency training. To dismantle these barriers, disrupt generalized stereotypes about disability and accommodation in graduate medical education (GME), and normalize the concept of people with disabilities entering residency training, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and the Docs With Disabilities Initiative are working together to create a hub to house resources on disability inclusion in GME. The Multi-Media Resource Hub for Disability Inclusion in GME is intended to increase the likelihood of residents and fellows receiving reasonable accommodation in their training programs and increase overall learner wellness. The hub’s resources will include information on topics such as normalizing disability inclusion, creating safe environments for disclosing disabilities, and meeting legal obligations for disability inclusion.

PIs: William McDade, MD, PhD, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, ACGME; Lisa Meeks, PhD, MA, Associate Professor of Family Medicine & Learning Health Sciences, University of Michigan, and Executive Director of Docs With Disabilities

Physicians and nurses may not report mistreatment in the clinical learning environment if they believe nothing will be done—but nothing can be done if the issue is not reported. Health professionals are vulnerable to mistreatment from patients and family members but may lack strategies to confront these challenging interactions. To foster skills and empower early-career physicians, nurses, and nurse practitioners to respond to mistreatment as a team, faculty at Boston Children’s Hospital are implementing a novel workshop. The goal of the intervention—which will be co-facilitated in small groups led by nursing and medical faculty—is to teach participants to view their colleagues from other disciplines as allies at the bedside and respond to, and also report, mistreatment as an interprofessional team.

PI: Jennifer Kesselheim, MD, MEd, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Medical Director of GME, and DIO for Boston Children's Hospital

In clinical learning environments, curricula focused around health equity tend to lack interprofessional and experiential components. At Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, all first-year residents will participate in a multidisciplinary health equity workshop followed by simulation exercises, including a mock electronic health record, a recorded patient care handoff, and an encounter with a standardized patient. Upon completion, participants will receive feedback from the standardized patient, perform a self-assessment, and join a facilitated, multidisciplinary debriefing where they will identify ways to collaborate interprofessionally to enhance equity in clinical care. The experience is intended to help residents be cognizant of individual biases (their own and those of others), understand the issue of structural injustice, and address the impacts of bias and injustice on their patients and peers.

PIs: Marquita Genies, MD, MPH, Assistant Dean for GME and Postdoctoral Affairs - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Associate Residency Program Director and Assistant Professor in Pediatrics; Kamna Balhara, MD, MA, Associate Residency Program Director and Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine

Interprofessional training in apology and disclosure communication skills can improve the clinical learning environment by building trust among caregivers and patients. This project at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School will include building and piloting independent learning modules, standardized patient experiences, and workshops with deliberate practice in disclosing and apologizing for errors for learners in graduate medical and nursing education. Information gleaned from a small pilot effort will be used to refine and open the curriculum to all graduate medical education and graduate school of nursing students. To increase accessibility and dissemination, the project will include building an interprofessional, team-based virtual reality scenario using cases and videos.

PIs: Stacy Potts, MD, Senior Associate Dean of GME and Professor of Family Medicine & Community Health; Sunita Puri, MD, Program Director, UMass Chan Hospice & Palliative Medicine Fellowship and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine

While some progress has been made toward eliminating bias and developing equitable assessment of learners in graduate medical education (GME), a critical need remains: faculty working with learners to co-create solutions and place equity at the forefront of assessment. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, faculty, working together with residents, will use quality improvement and co-design principles to develop a deeper understanding of the systems perpetuating inequitable assessment, co-create solutions, and pilot test this intervention among internal medicine, emergency medicine, and obstetrics/gynecology residents. The results of this study are expected to inform larger scale interventions to create fair and equitable assessment across GME.

PIs: Mira Mamtani, MD, MSEd, Associate Professor and Associate Residency Program Director for Emergency Medicine; Veronica Andrews, MD, Resident Physician in Emergency Medicine