Joseph Zorek | Nexus Summit 2023

Joseph Zorek, PharmD, BCGP, FNAP

Executive Director & Professor

University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

Joseph A. Zorek, PharmD, BCGP, FNAP, is the Executive Director of UT Health San Antonio’s Quality Enhancement Plan—Linking Interprofessional Networks for Collaboration (LINC)—and a tenured Professor in the School of Nursing, where he teaches advanced pharmacotherapeutics. Joe co-authored the 2019 Health Professions Accreditors Collaborative national consensus guidance on quality interprofessional education (IPE) and is currently representing the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy on the national workgroup assembled to update the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) core competencies framework scheduled for publication in Fall 2023. Joe published Interprofessional Practice in Pharmacy: Featuring Illustrated Case Studies with McGraw-Hill Education in 2021, a textbook intended to highlight the myriad ways pharmacists leverage their expertise to advance the safe and effective use of medications as contributing members of interprofessional teams.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

Improving Interprofessional Communication and Teamwork Through a Caregiver Simulation

Lightning Talk Description: Background: As the US population ages, many older adults with dementia rely on family caregivers for health-related care and daily activities. Issues associated with caregiver burden in this setting are well-documented, including caregivers’ diminished quality of life and health. Strong interprofessional care is required to support family caregivers and maximize patient outcomes, and students must be prepared for this environment. Building upon the interprofessional education (IPE) literature demonstrating the effectiveness of simulation to advance…

Promoting Consistency in IPE Reporting to Encourage Replicability, Reproducibility, and Generalizability: Interrogating an Initial List of Variables Derived from the Literature

Seminar Description: Problem Statement: Replicability and generalizability of interprofessional education (IPE) outcomes is hampered by inconsistent reporting of IPE characteristics/variables and limited multi-institutional studies. Assuming single site studies continue to be highly represented in published literature, it is critical to advocate for a solution which supports replicability and allows researchers to account for variability in learning environments across institutions. Background: A team of researchers from 8 institutions/organizations in the US took the first steps in…

Transitioning from Classroom to Practice: A Para-clinical Interprofessional Education Pilot

Poster Description: Background: While critical to improving learning and health care outcomes, large-scale clinical interprofessional education (IPE) within authentic clinical learning environments (CLEs) remains challenging. As a bridge to transition from preclinical to clinical IPE at a large academic health center, our team designed and piloted a self-guided, para-clinical IPE experience that will allow hundreds of interprofessional student groups to apply IPEC-derived teamwork concepts learned together to their individual experiences within CLEs. Results from this initial para-clinical…

UT Health San Antonio’s LINC Core IPE Measurement Plan: Connecting Students’ IPE Growth Across Programs, Schools, and the University

Lightning Talk Description: This Lightning Talk will describe a key component of UT Health San Antonio’s commitment to advancing interprofessional education (IPE)—the Linking Interprofessional Networks for Collaboration (LINC) Core IPE Measurement Plan. This university-wide project involved development, implementation, and analysis of a set of core IPE measures for all students at our university, with the explicit goal of embedding a standardized assessment/evaluation mechanism as an expectation for all schools to capture uniform IPE learning outcomes across campus. Key features of the LINC…

What’s Your Pitch? Adopting a Business Approach to Advocate for IPE Resources

Seminar Description: Background: Most healthcare education program accreditors in the US require that learners receive training and experience that will enable them to collaborate effectively on interprofessional teams when they graduate (HPAC, 2019). However, a recent study of the organizational structure of IPE programs in the U.S. found that dedicated resources for IPE tend to be associated with centralized infrastructure at institutions with an academic health center (Shrader et al, 2022). Institutions without such resources may struggle to develop and sustain IPE programs due to a…