Today I was back in the office after HITS. I watched the Lilly Conference recorded session entitled “Finding the Right Dose of Learner Collaboration through the Development and Implementation of a Medicine and Pharmacy Interprofessional Education Experience.” Diane H. Quinn, Dana C. Farabaugh, Rebecca E. Munger, and Cathy Y. Poon were the presenters. Their goals were to describe the process for identifying learning outcomes shared between the different health professions programs, discuss the creation and implementation of their pilot activity, and discuss the challenges and solutions for their activity. Quinn spoke about interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional practice (IPP) and how they have been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO). Interprofessional practice, Quinn mentioned, involves not only interactions between different disciplines but also with the community. The group began by setting goals and identifying curricular gaps and accreditation needs. They then recruited volunteers and they were able to embed the activity in a course at one institution and recruit volunteers at another. They wanted to focus on realistic activities and align their goals with curricular objectives. The student deliverables were the prescription writing (medical students) and revision (pharmacy students) practices. Farabaugh talked about the time they spent designing the mini cases and prescription templates. Medical students were assigned 3-4 cases for different situations and wrote prescriptions on GoogleDrive folders for review by the pharmacy students. Pharmacy students completed a form on how they reviewed the prescriptions. Next, medical students and pharmacology students worked together to debrief with facilitators/faculty. What surprised me was the amount of feedback between groups that occurred. In response to this activity, they are creating a video to provide structure and suggestions for prescription writing and review. Quinn spoke about the difficulties in scheduling a time to video conference after the activity. This activity was very complex and had several stages. I think the use of GoogleDrives and feedback was really well-suited for the multi-group nature of this pilot. I wonder if something similar could be done between courses with wet lab and bioinformatics activities?
