Abstract
Historically, physicians have worked in isolation. More recently, there has been an emphasis to create interprofessional patient care teams to provide better patient care and reduce patient risk. This shift in focus has filtered down to the undergraduate medical education level where the American Association of Medical Colleges has created accreditation standards focused on interprofessional team training. This paper gives a first-hand narrative on how interdprofessional training can shift perspectives and create effective team members centered around patient care.
Highlights
Physicians have been perceived as working in isolation to take care of all a patient’s problems
Moving away from the traditional view of physicians working in isolation, emphasis in healthcare practices has been on a multidisciplinary approach where several specialties work with a patient, but in parallel (Pecukonis, 2009)
Understanding other disciplines’ assessments and trainings have helped me utilize the Interprofessional Education Collaboration (IPEC) Roles/Responsibilities sub-competency 9 - “use unique and complementary abilities of all members of the team to optimize health and patient care” (IPEC, 2016). It helped me self-reflect on personal biases I had surrounding the role of a physician on the patient care team
Summary
Physicians have been perceived as working in isolation to take care of all a patient’s problems. A competent patient care team prevents disease, limits mistakes, and promotes health (Boult, 2009). Interprofessional teams require efficient and competent team members with skills beyond individual medical knowledge. Medical students’ education is focused on pathology and pharmacology with little to no emphasis or experience on how to utilize other disciplines’ skills, to collaborate with other professions, or even tofully understand the role of other health professionals with whom they work daily. Pecukonis et al argue the pneumonic “IDEA” creates a framework to help students learn towork competently across disciplines, creating interprofessional patient care teams. As a third-year medical student at Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans, I have had many opportunities to work in an interprofessional setting and utilize this framework to improve my interprofessional cultural competence
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