UIF Project: Health Science Interdisciplinary Partnerships in Clinical Education

“But you’re already doing that, aren’t you?”

This is a common reaction when Pamela Mitchell, chair of the steering committee and professor of nursing, describes the new Health Sciences Interdisciplinary Clinical Education program.

But although interdisciplinary teams have become more common in a variety of health care settings, often as one result of managed care and re-engineering, interdisciplinary training for health sciences students has never been fully developed.

“Beginning in the 1970s,” Mitchell said, “interdisciplinary team projects were funded in certain areas—geriatrics and rehabilitation medicine, for example. And in some of those specialities, the concept of teams as a way to work with patients became well established and then was integrated into their training programs.”

But the majority of students in medicine, nursing and other health sciences fields haven’t had a training experience that focused on working with other professions, although they often are trained in the same settings, a situation Mitchell refers to as “parallel play.”

The Health Sciences Interdisciplinary Partnerships in Clinical Education project has been funded by the University Initiatives Fund to develop, implement and sustain an interdisciplinary model for clinical education in primary care settings. The model site at Harborview Medical Center focuses on providing the continuum of care in an urban underserved setting. Other sites could be developed in the future to provide, for example, a rural track.

All of the health sciences schools—dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health and social work—are participating, along with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the Health Sciences Library and Information Center.

“Until now,” she said, “most interdisciplinary projects have been funded from outside and those approaches didn’t necessarily have a good fit with the complexity of our organization. The UIF designation and funding have provided a structure within the University that will support this effort.”

Some of the most difficult barriers to overcome in setting up interdisciplinary training, Mitchell noted, have been time schedules and faculty commitment. The clinical education project will not be hiring new faculty, but supports a percentage of the salaries for participating faculty.

“Within the UW structure,” Mitchell said, “the UIF funding has given us ways to work around both the time and commitment barriers that have blocked other interdisciplinary efforts.”

The interdisciplinary clinical education project has several parts, some already in operation and some still under development.

A course on “Interdisciplinary Collaborative Teams in Health Care” began this Winter Quarter and will be taught in each quarter except summer. The seminar course is not required before students participate in team training at Harborview, but is intended to provide an introduction to working together with other professionals to solve clinical problems. The course is taught on campus and has had about 80 participants so far.

The core of the program places health sciences students who are already assigned to training rotations at Harborview Medical Center in team settings. The students will gather for clinical case discussions, and then, using Web-based materials and interaction, the students will be able to carry on discussions about such things as appropriate professional roles in particular cases and situations.

“Case-based, problem-based learning is critical to our approach,” Mitchell said. “The resources of the IAIMS project in the Health Sciences Library and Information Center will enable us to develop easy access to materials that can be shared by students from several disciplines, and students will be able to keep up communication that way without scheduling so many sessions together.”

Other elements of the program include links to community agencies, faculty development opportunities, and an evaluation component.

A key goal of the program is to become an integral, permanent part of professional education in all of the health sciences schools.

The program is planning an introductory convocation for all incoming health sciences students on Sept. 24. Information on the proposal, the seminar, and plans for developing the program is available on the Web site at http://www.hslib.washington.edu/courses/hsice/ ¶

Claire Dietz

This article is the last in a series featuring projects that received UIF awards in 1997. More information on the UIF program is on the Website at http://www.washington.edu/uif/