Interactive Application of Concepts and Approaches for Building an Interprofessional Workplace Culture

The Phillips Neighborhood Clinic (PNC) is a student-run free clinic located in the Phillips Neighborhood of south Minneapolis. Starting in 2022, all of the nearly 200 first-year PNC volunteers are required to complete a three-session community engagement training program, developed and facilitated by PNC’s Community Relations team, one session focused on each of the following topics: (1) interprofessional workplace cultural humility, (2) structural competency, and (3) structural humility. The first of these three sessions encourages participants to notice connections between cultural humility and interprofessionalism, reflect on and share the implicit and explicit values of their respective fields, and reflect on how that’s informed their own professional worldview as early-career practitioners in their chosen fields. In particular, it emphasizes tenets of cultural humility and particularizes the concept to the healthcare workplace. This training strengthened the fabric of PNC’s workplace culture. By equipping PNC volunteers with a shared conceptual framework for interprofessional collaboration, it strengthened them to better work together for collective impact. One participant emerged with a renewed understanding of “[t]he importance of viewing scenarios through different lenses and the importance of staying curious through our professions” and another shared they “enjoyed talking with other professions and learning about their mental models to patient care.” Additionally, volunteers rated improvement in skills and competencies related to interprofessional understanding and collaboration higher than in any other trained area. By imparting specific concepts and critical thinking modalities, we broaden the scope of volunteers’ ability to understand varying perspectives; our vision is that volunteers use these critical thinking skills to enhance their interactions with patients, with one another, and with the community.

We believe conference participants would benefit from a one-hour interactive session with an explicit focus on fostering an interprofessional workplace culture. Participants would experience, first-hand, specific concepts and pedagogy that boosted PNC volunteers’ collective development as collaborative community partners and team members. Rooted in instructional methods such as case-based learning, a visualization exercise, individual reflection, and scaffolded small group discussion questions of increasing depth - and supported by Jamboards - this session supports clinic volunteers in considering how their own viewpoints and profession-specific training informs their assumptions and actions in an interprofessional healthcare team. If comfortable, participants may also discuss how aspects of their personal identity intersect with their professional identity in the context of interprofessional workplace cultural humility.

By imparting critical thinking modalities and models for self-reflection and group dialogue, we broaden the scope of volunteers’ ability to understand varying perspectives. Our vision is for volunteers to use these approaches to enhance their interactions with patients, with one another, and with the community. After attending the session participants will be able to conceptualize the role of dialogue and reflection as a key component in the praxis of a healthcare provider, have approaches to fostering group trust and understanding in the workplace, and be able to facilitate a conversation on interprofessional workplace cultural humility for their own team.