New to Didactics: An Innovative Interprofessional Curriculum

The CCC-BIDMC crew has been working hard over the last year to embody "interprofessionalism." When medical students work alongside nurse practitioner students, pharmacy students, and other healthcare professionals, they learn to value teamwork early in their professional careers. They say raising a child takes a village, and taking care of patients definitely takes a TEAM.

In this evening's didactic session, Dr. Amy Weinstein and senior director Megan Koster introduced a new interprofessional education (IPE) curriculum called Team Stepps to CCC-BIDMC.  In a series of four lectures, they hope to teach students how to work on a team of healthcare workers from different professional backgrounds. 

The first lecture focused on leadership, which they defined as "a process of motivating people to work together collaboratively to accomplish tasks." There are four main characteristics to effective leadership:

1. Role Modeling
2. Shaping teamwork through open sharing of information
3. Constructive and timely feedback
4. Facilitation of briefs, huddles, debriefs, and conflict resolution

What Team Stepps calls "briefs" are the same as our pre-clinic huddles, so we have that one covered. The use of mid-session "huddles" is something that we haven't fully incorporated in our clinic practice at CCC."Debriefs" or post-clinic feedback is something we've been talking about a lot on the medical education committee. We're hoping to pilot a new 360 degree feedback method for SC/JC teams.

 
Students shared several learning "pearls" at the end of the session, including the importance of agenda setting and communication flow. It was great to see the room rearranged into four tables to facilitate group discussion between our medical, NP, and pharmacy students.

Energy was high tonight, so we are all looking forward to our next IPE Teamwork session on "Situation Monitoring" on February 18th.

-Laura Cohen MSIV, Senior Director and Med Ed Committee Chair