REACH (Realizing Educational Advancement for Collaborative Health)

Theme: Interprofessional Education and Teamwork

Institution: University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus

Grant Type: Board Grant

Award Amount: $688,110

Grant Awarded: January 2010

Principal Investigator: Mark Earnest, MD, PhD

Grant Description

The Anschutz Medical Campus (AMC) of the University of Colorado Denver was intentionally designed to facilitate collaborative, interprofessional (IP) education. This project is the next step in realizing this long‐term vision of transforming the delivery of health care to meet the needs of the new century. The project will create a longitudinal, interprofessional curriculum that is integrated into the preclinical and clinical training for all of our health profession students, and will establish, teach, and evaluate campus‐wide student competencies in teamwork, collaborative interprofessional practice, and quality and safety with a particular focus on vulnerable and underserved populations.

Their goal is to create a curricular thread that is shared across all schools and programs that begins the day they walk on campus and continues throughout their educational experience.

The proposed project will build on the existing successful but limited interprofessional educational offerings. The initiative is designed to weave this content deeply into the experience of each student and into the sites where they will do their clinical training.

The proposed project has three core elements:

The Health Mentors Program

Entering students will be placed into interprofessional teams of 4‐6 students and paired with a health mentor from the community. The teams will remain together for two years. Health mentors will be individuals (or parent/child pairs) with a chronic physical or mental illness or disability. Teams will meet every six weeks with their mentors to complete a specific task. The tasks to be accomplished with the mentor will include exploring and documenting: a life and health context history, a medical history, experiences with access to care and care integration, experiences with illness and care, an individualized wellness plan, behavioral and mental health, and prescription and over the counter drugs and safety. Embedded in this curriculum and within each task will be an exploration of roles and orientations of the different professions involved and skills building in teamwork and communication. The Health Mentors Program is modeled after a program developed at Thomas Jefferson University that we chose after reviewing existing interprofessional training programs for pre‐clinical health professions students in the US and Canada. The Jefferson program is well‐established, well evaluated, and has been a willing partner with us as we seek to learn from and build upon their experience.

The Clinical Transformations Program

The Center for Advancing Professional Excellence (CAPE) has dedicated space and staff to perform a variety of sophisticated simulations with video monitoring and learner feedback. This project will expand the programs currently offered by the CAPE in the following ways. All students will undergo training in the TeamSTEPPS (Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety) curriculum for clinical communications developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Department of Defense. TeamSTEPPS is the most well‐established, widely used and evaluated model for clinical communications available at this point in time. All students will also participate in two clinical simulations that require interprofessional collaborative practice skills for success. They will develop a menu of simulation exercises that will encompass a broad array of scenarios to include a variety of clinical settings as well as public health events and crises.

CAPE is already assisting a number of their clinical training partners in developing TeamSTEPPS processes and training capacity. University of Colorado Denver’s clinical transformations program will provide a parallel training track for health professions students. The goal is that within the three year duration of this grant, they will establish Team STEPPS as a shared model and language for clinical communication among students, faculty, and clinical staff at each of the core clinical training sites. Additionally, they intend to evaluate the effectiveness of their curriculum over time by observing and evaluating the demonstration of interprofessional competencies through the simulation exercises in the CAPE.

The Interprofessional Clinical Rotations Program

This program element will facilitate students’ participation in interprofessional collaborative practice experiences as a routine and fundamental part of their clinical training. University of Colorado Denver will initially develop a rubric to objectively measure the interprofessional clinical and educational content of a clinical experience. They will also survey existing training sites and establish a catalogue documenting existing models of interprofessional practice and how those practices are incorporated into the clinical educational experiences that occur at those sites.

Ultimately, they will merge the rubric and the catalogue in order to rate clinical experiences based on interprofessional content. Additionally, they will work with each school and program to develop requirements for interprofessional clinical experiences while they work with clinical sites to develop their capacity to provide collaborative, interprofessional care and to emphasize those aspects of care in their educational endeavors.