Interprofessional Clinical Assignments: A Project in Nursing Education.

Education involving interprofessional activities helps to improve learning and the ability to work in an effective collaborative environment. In this project, 16 baccalaureate nursing students were given the opportunity to work with other members of the health care team to develop an understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each group of professionals and the communication skills needed to provide quality and safe care to patients and to positively impact their motivation to work with members of other health professions. All the students in the group documented the successful completion of these objectives in their journals.Keywords: nursing; students; interprofessional; clinical; collaborationIn the health care climate of today, it is increasingly important for nurses and other health care team members to be collaborative partners in patient care. According to the Institute of Medicine (2011), nurses and other health care providers should become full partners in the redesign of health care to improve the system. According to Reeves, Tassone, Parker, Wagner, and Simmons (2012), education involving interprofessional activities helps to improve learning and the ability to work in an effective collaborative environment. Interprofessional education is present "when students of two or more professions associated with health or social care are engaged in learning with, from, and about each other" (Ponzer et al., 2004, p. 728).Patient safety is at the center of the move toward interprofessional practice. Improved communication between the disciplines should improve the quality and coordination of care and prevent negative patient outcomes such as sentinel events (Lidskog, Lofmark, & Ahlstrom, 2008). The Joint Commission lists improper communication as a leading root cause of sentinel events (Brock et al., 2013). A sentinel event is "an unexpected occurrence involving death or serious physical or psychological injury, or the risk thereof" (The Joint Commission, 2014, para. 2). Other examples of negative patient outcomes include hospital-acquired infections, harmful medication errors, and pressure ulcer formation (Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 2014).Health care reform places a major focus on primary and preventive care, requiring health care professionals to work collaboratively to ensure a streamlined approach to health care, improving coordination, delivery, and evaluation of care in diverse settings and populations (Sullivan & Godfrey, 2012). The concepts of teamwork and collaboration are not new, but the popularity of improved education in these areas has surged in the past few years. In the 2008 competency statements from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, an entire section is devoted to interprofessional communication and collaboration. In addition, in 2008, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement launched "Open School," an interactive resource for students, faculty, and professionals designed to improve safety, leadership, and patient-centered care. Interprofessional communication is a major section of this program.INTERPROFESSIONAL EDUCATIONStudents entering the health care field are now expected to engage in collaborative practice with other health care team members as they begin their respective professions. Reeves et al. (2012) state that the traditional (silo) approaches to education are no longer valid in supporting the new collaborative model of health care and that teaching and learning must include interprofessional aspects to adequately prepare students for their evolving roles in health care. The silo approach to education involves teaching each specialty as a separate member of the health care team instead of parts of the same whole. The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) issued a report in 2011 proposing four competency domains that would enhance shared learning across the disciplines: values and ethics, roles and responsibilities for collaborative practice, interprofessional communication, and teamwork and team-based care (IPEC, 2011). …