Improving Patient Care by Improving Communication of the Care Team: An Interactive IPE Activity

Poster Description:
Healthcare educators prepare workforce-ready graduates with the skills necessary to provide patient-centered care. Understanding safe/effective patient care is a team effort requiring a complex mix of formal and informal roles/responsibilities is critical to the execution of quality care. This poster will present an interactive method of examining the responsibilities of healthcare professionals and their roles as team members.

Observational Research Design:
A situational actively using interdisciplinary care delivery is used to help students explore various roles of healthcare providers. The role-play is presented in a series of stations where they encounter each caregiver involved in the plan. Students work through stations in sequential order encountering and responding to other health team members that include: a social worker, a nurse, an OT, the orthopedic surgeon, and transport aids. The final station is a debriefing station where students can discuss their overall reaction to the activity as well as have a focused discussion related to teamwork, roles and responsibilities, and communication.

Observations:
The effectiveness of the activity was appraised through instructor observation and feedback from students during an oral debriefing and a post-activity reflective paper. After three years of data collection, several themes emerged including: a recognition of the situational need for adjustment of communication style; inconsistency in students’ perception of their preparedness; and a more comprehensive understanding of the various healthcare provider roles critical to patient-centered care delivery. Students' feedback is overall positive for the interactive role-play and meaningful for providing insight into their preparedness for clinical practice. Instructors’ observations indicate highly engaged students who were focused and responsive throughout the activity.

Conclusion:
This innovative interactive situational role-play activity was a simulation with DPT students. We plan to expand the number of stations in the situational role play to include more care team members such as psychologists, and chaplains. Exploration is being done into the logistics of including more live interactive components including multiple options for each station, using trained practicing clinicians for live role plays instead of video recorded segments, and mixed professional student groups to increase the diversity of group members to stimulate richer discussion and reflection.