Editor’s Notebook: Learning to Work Together

Learning to Work Together

SUSAN CARR
Editor, susan.psqh@gmail.com

Two articles in this issue are part of an ongoing series about interprofessional and multidisciplinary education in healthcare. Most authors are members of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Open School community (www.ihi.org/openschool), which offers alternative learning opportunities, and online training in quality improvement and patient safety.

The authors of this issue’s articles are at different points in their careers. Brian Patterson, author of the cover story “A Model for Simulation-Based Interprofessional Team Learning” (p. 22) is a fourth-year medical student at the Wright State University (WSU) Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton, Ohio, and leader of the university’s Open School chapter. Patterson describes a high-fidelity simulation training exercise that brought students from WSU’s schools of medicine and nursing together with students of pharmacy at Cedarville University. He reports on data the group collected to measure satisfaction with interprofessional education (IPE) and simulation training and reflects on how IPE has helped him prepare for surgical residency. Patterson understands that “successful surgical care requires a team approach to best practice by a variety of healthcare professionals” and that patients are the true beneficiaries.

Ramon Cancino, author of “Training for Integrated Multidisciplinary Care” (p. 12), recalls witnessing “a healthcare system struggling to communicate with itself” when he was a medical student in 2008. The clinicians he observed often tried to work in teams, but were thwarted by problems as basic as poorly designed workspaces. He later was part of a group that started one of the first hospital-based Open School chapters. Cancino is now chief medical officer and chairman of the Quality Improvement Committee of a community health center in Mattapan, Massachusetts, where he has developed a multidisciplinary curriculum for staff education. He stresses the importance of empowering team members to engage in difficult but positive conversations about quality and improvement. His leadership and the center’s commitment has “allowed the health center to change its perspective on health … from individuals to populations, from silos to communication, and from individual experience to systems and processes.”

Readers may recall Josh Adams’ article in the May/June issue, in which he wondered if interdisciplinary education had become a buzzword in medical training, receiving more attention from marketing departments than actual resources for current students. Judging from his experience as well as that of Patterson and Cancino, interprofessional and multidisciplinary training in healthcare is vibrant and meaningful, though students still too often need to find it outside the official curriculum. Open School programs help, and some, including Patterson, report that IPE is beginning to make its way into official university programs.

When I look back at how many PSQH articles implicitly cover aspects of interprofessional experiences in healthcare, I realize that our focus on IPE and training is overdue. Many improvement initiatives—population health, care transitions, team training, handoffs—as well as most patient care delivery settings, require healthcare professionals to work together to solve problems and care for patients as well as each other.

Authors in this series appropriately identify better patient care as the purpose behind IPE. Successful communication, effective teamwork, and respectful professional relationships are known to improve care delivery. In addition to safer and more efficient care, I imagine that IPE training will also lead to better communication with patients and family members, who are also participants in the “team.” The benefits may be hard to contain!