Students Driving IPE PLACES
Interprofessional Student Poster Description: IPE PLACES is an annual event in coordination with student affairs and interprofessional education (IPE) offices. For the Spring 2023 event, select students from the health sciences programs at Campbell University College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences constructed a total of 6 stations: leadership, professional communication, medical interpreting skills, blood pressure measurement, physical fitness, and wellness, which focused on the IPEC competencies and provider wellness. The development of content and facilitation of the event was entirely student-driven, allowing over 500 students to participate in an event built by their colleagues.
The professional communication station provided students with a recall exercise to help them learn how to apply team dynamics and relationship-building values to interprofessional teamwork. The physical fitness station had interprofessional teams utilize collaboration and interprofessional communication strategies to learn how to improve teamwork. The medical interpreting station focused on interprofessional communication and how this skill can be used to improve patient outcomes. The skill station for blood pressure measurement allowed participants to recognize the different roles and responsibilities within the healthcare team and how this impacts overall patient wellness. The leadership station encompassed building spaghetti-marshmallow structures to help demonstrate relationship-building values and team dynamics and the importance of planning, delivering, and evaluating patient care. Lastly, the mindfulness station allowed students to complete a mindfulness body scan to consider the importance of future healthcare providers' wellness and recognize how that affects their work and patient outcomes.
All student participants were allowed to complete an event evaluation encompassing pre/post-retrospective survey questions centered on understanding roles and responsibilities and teamwork and additional questions about interprofessional communication and collaboration. Overall, students found the event valuable (mean 3.99, scale 1-5) in recognizing the impact collaboration and communication have on patient outcomes (mean 4.36, scale 1-5) and noted an improvement in identifying their roles within the healthcare team. Through this experience, student facilitators learned how to effectively create content for an interprofessional event, lead a group of students, and educate future healthcare providers. Challenges noted by the student facilitators included developing content that provided equitable applicability to all health sciences programs, recognizing one's limitations in understanding the roles of other healthcare professions, and creating stations focusing on IPE, given logistical constraints of time, space, and group size.
