A recent Academic Medicine article co-authored by Josette Rivera, MD, Bridget O’Brien, PhD, and Maria Wamsley, MD, reported on the range of interprofessional interactions for School of Medicine (SOM) students within the clinical microsystems clerkship (CMC), which is a core part of the School of Medicine Bridges Curriculum.
During CMC, small groups of students spend a half day per week at a CMC site to work on systems improvement projects and develop clinical skills. In a qualitative study, Rivera, O’Brien, and Wamsley examined the nature of interprofessional interactions, clinical workflow, and faculty coach facilitation in the context of the CMC sites. Students who were interviewed came from inpatient, outpatient, and emergency settings, and although systems improvement projects were diverse, there were commonalities in findings across sites.
“Clinical sites that provided rich interprofessional interactions tended to have experience with early medical students and with systems improvement projects. Their staff were welcoming and supportive and learners had relatively consistent interactions with them,” says Rivera.
Common barriers to interprofessional interactions included sites where the staff changed frequently or where there were scheduling conflicts, which made it difficult for students to interact with other professionals with consistency or depth.
Despite these barriers, Rivera reports that all students who were interviewed expressed “real appreciation of the responsibilities and abilities of the different healthcare professionals in their settings. It was an eye-opening experience to see specific examples of how interprofessional interactions can profoundly impact patient care.”
“One of the students was with a clinical psychologist who was part of a behavioral health team and consulting on a patient. The psychologist made specific recommendations to help the patient that no one on the team had thought of. The student took away that it was really exciting to see what others bring to the table and made her much more inclined to seek advice from different types of healthcare professionals.”
The study reinforces that systems improvement projects hold great potential to fulfill important features of effective workplace interprofessional education.
Rivera says, “Findings of the study have informed how to enhance the interprofessional experiences for our students both locally and, hopefully, nationally, as other medical schools seek to develop effective interprofessional education in clinical settings.”
