Maria
Brucato,
PhD
Director of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
Thomas Jefferson University
Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education
Maria Brucato is the Director of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research at Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (JCIPE) at Thomas Jefferson University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology, Cognition and Neuroscience from Temple University with a concentration in Quantitative Methods. Maria works with interprofessional teams to impliment assessment and evaluation of interprofessional education programs at JCIPE and oversees the center’s research endeavors. She currently serves as the co-chair of JCIPE's Committee on Assessment, Research, and Evaluation and as a member on the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education's Interprofessional Continuing Education Review Committee.
Presenting at the Nexus Summit:
Lightning Talk Description: Black women face higher mortality rates during childbirth due to factors such as provider dismissiveness and unnecessary interventions (Adams & Thomas, 2017; Bond et al., 2021). In this lightning talk, we will present outcomes of an interprofessional simulation developed for healthcare student teams to address structural racism and provider biases that impact Black maternal health care. Six student teams (N = 27; 82% female) including students from six different health professions interacted with a pregnant patient in her third trimester and her partner (…
Lightning Talk Description: The need for primary palliative care education has been recognized across multiple disciplines, but many existing educational efforts have been siloed within individual disciplines. In this lightning talk, we will discuss the development and outcomes of the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education’s Interprofessional Palliative Care program from its pilot in 2020 to its most recent implementation in Spring of 2023. Aligned with the National Consensus Project’s Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care, the program is a semester-…
Lightning Talk Description: This presentation will discuss the development and implementation of a continuous quality improvement (CQI) project targeting an interprofessional training program, Enhancing Services for Homeless Populations (ESHP). ESHP uses a 3-D virtual world (3-DVW) to train interprofessional teams of students in health and human service professions to advance their knowledge and skills in caring for persons experiencing homelessness (PEH). The focus of the CQI was to implement and evaluate the impact of new content in the area of harm reduction on student knowledge, attitudes…
Lightning Talk Description: This presentation describes the development of a virtual reality (VR) case scenario that engages interprofessional student teams in exploring an older adult’s (Ms. K) living environment through an Escape Room to identify the 4Ms of Age-Friendly Health Systems: What Matters, Medication, Mentation and Mobility. An additional component consists of videos illustrating interactions between Ms. K. (portrayed by a simulated patient) and her care team (actual healthcare providers) providing transitional care after a recent hospitalization.
The VR case scenario is being…
The Health Professions Accreditors Collaborative's (HPAC) guidance document on developing quality interprofessional education (IPE) for the health professions underscores the importance of utilizing shared terminology, providing clear rationale, and intentionally and longitudinally integrating interprofessional learning activities into professional curricula. To provide a consistent method for all health professions students to receive common foundational knowledge of IPE and collaborative practice (CP), an interprofessional team at the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and…
Over the last three years, faculty and staff members of the Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education’s Racial and Social Justice Taskforce (RSJT) have worked together to actualize the interconnectedness of interprofessional collaborative practice and the advancement of anti-racism in health education and practice. To aid in this work, the team created a curriculum self-study tool, intended to guide critical thinking and facilitate idea generation around issues of racial and social justice within and across the Center’s interprofessional education (IPE) programs. The tool…
The 4Ms (What Matters, Medications, Mobility, and Mentation) constitute a framework for caring for older adults advanced by the John A. Hartford Foundation and Institute for Healthcare Improvement to guide healthcare systems to become "Age-Friendly" to meet the needs of an aging population. This framework provides an opportunity to train healthcare students in principles of age-friendly care. The Jefferson Health Mentors Program is a required, experiential, interprofessional program that involves student teams from 11 professions who engage with a Health Mentor—a community dwelling adult with…
Lightning Talk Description: The Jefferson Student Interprofessional Complex Care Collaborative (J-SICCC), formerly known as the Student Hotspotting program, is an experiential, six-month program that pairs interprofessional teams of students with individuals in the community experiencing complex health and social needs. J-SICCC is based on the hotspotting model, developed by the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers. It involves the strategic use of data to direct personalized, hands-on interventions toward “high-utilizers” with the aim of improving health while reducing high utilization…