Download as an Adobe PDF - University of Medicine and Dentistry ...

If collaborative work among
the professions — interprofessionalism
— is the future of
excellent health professions
education and healthcare
delivery, UMDNJ’s Stratford
campus is setting the pace.
These are some of the questions at the core of the Inter-
School Collaboration Group formed by the six schools of the
University with programs on the Stratford campus. In 2009, the
Group introduced an Interprofessional Grand Rounds (IPGR)
series, a response to a call to action from the Institute of
Medicine and other leaders in health professions education to
embrace and advance the concept of “team.”
Grand rounds have traditionally been an important teaching
tool and ritual of medical education and inpatient care. Usually a
specific medical problem and a particular patient were presented
to an audience of doctors, residents and medical students. Over
time, Grand Rounds have evolved into sessions rarely having a
patient present and more closely resembling a lecture. Adding a
new dimension to the concept, the IPGR presents the broader
picture, welcomes all healthcare professionals, and stresses the
value of working together to better serve the patient.
Planning the IPGR in Stratford has itself been an exercise in
collaboration among the schools and the Student Senate.
Students from all the schools are invited, and nearly 200 on
average attend the hour-long, late afternoon sessions. These
events have covered a variety of topics from an interprofessional
perspective: Diabetes and Weight Loss, Alzheimer’s disease,
Jillian Longobardo admits that she completed
her rotation in OB/GYN at Our Lady of
Lourdes in Camden with “chills and tears in
her eyes.” You see, she had delivered three
babies during this “incredible experience.” But
Longobardo, starting her third year in
UMDNJ’s Physician Assistant (PA) program,
was also one of the first on the University’s
southern New Jersey campus to experience a
new way of looking at clerkships, or rotations,
where future healthcare professionals are trained to function as
team members.
2 8 U M D N J M A G A Z I N E
Fragile X and Autism, for example.
The latest session, on April 26, focused on smoking and
health and an interprofessional approach to a patient with chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema. Faculty included
professors and instructors from six UMDNJ schools in Stratford,
and Student Senator Boulos served as moderator. “The campus
goes smoke free on July 1,” he notes, “and the Grand Rounds
was planned with this in mind. We looked at smoking and
disease. But on the positive side, we also got to see how many
resources there were to help smokers.”
Boulos sees the IPGR as windows into his future, which at
this point he thinks may be research. Whether he ultimately
finds himself in a laboratory or a physician’s office, he already
understands how important it will be to patient outcomes for the
lines of communications between professions to be open. “I
think health care is becoming less about the disease and more
about the individual patient,” he says, “and this will require a
better understanding of how the different professions interact.
Everyone needs to be on the same page.”
The IPGR project is coordinated by the School of
Osteopathic Medicine, the largest school in Stratford, and not
coincidentally the one led by Thomas Cavalieri, DO, a recognized
national expert on interprofessional education. He was an
invited participant in a public-private collaboration of the Health
Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) and various foundations
that explored team-based competencies as a foundation
for education and clinical practice. And previously he had been
appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to the
advisory committee on HRSA’s interdisciplinary and communitybased
linkages.
“Professional education has been very discipline specific,”
Dean Cavalieri notes. “Our Interprofessional Grand Rounds ask
faculty to go beyond sharing content in their own field of expertise
to talk instead about the potential of collaboration.” And he is
quick to add that the ultimate goal is to demonstrate how
patients benefit when healthcare professionals work together. He
is convinced they will. .
A New Spin on Rotations
Longobardo’s appreciation for teamwork came when a good
friend who was a physician assistant encouraged this pre-med
student to shadow her before choosing a career direction. “I’m
an outgoing, friendly person and saw that PAs got to spend a lot
of time with patients,” Longobardo recalls. “But I also saw how
closely the PAs work with doctors.”
This year for the first time students at the School of
Osteopathic Medicine (SOM) shared rotations with four PA students
and also saw firsthand just how closely the two work
together. Medical school students have traditionally spent the
first half of their training in the classroom and the second half in
clerkships in teaching hospitals. There they rotate through