Case Writing for Interprofessional Learners

Workshop Description:
Case studies are a powerful learning tool for self-directed learning and exploration and can stimulate sharing ideas between individuals with different professional backgrounds. Both writing cases in an interprofessional team and analyzing cases in an interprofessional team provide an intensive teamwork experience. Case studies can also provide vital context to illustrate and humanize abstract concepts by including patient stories. Cases that address both individual patient circumstances and systemic issues in health care provide a rich base for learners to engage in a challenging and high quality interprofessional educational experience.
CLARION is a interprofessional student organization at the University of Minnesota focused on eliminating professional silos to build a better healthcare system. The five pillars of CLARION are Leadership, Interprofessional Teamwork, Communication, Patient Safety and Quality, and Patient-Centered Care. The annual CLARION Interprofessional Case Competition is centered around a case study and engages health professional students from around the country with varied backgrounds including over ten professions.
The CLARION case writers have devised a stepwise process for developing the framework of a case as follows: identifying an audience, identifying areas of learning or regional trends, choose a specific prompt, identifying stakeholders, outlining the process, writing your prompt, and presenting a case. These steps can be applied both to create a case to stimulate learners from all backgrounds or professions and to engage a diverse set of professionals and stakeholders in the creation of the case. Our workshop will guide participants through these steps in small groups while sharing advice on creating interprofessional healthcare cases.

Learner Outcomes: At the end of this session, participants will:
1) Articulate the elements of a case with emphasis on those related to interprofessional learning
2) Develop learning outcomes for case writing and case analysis participants
3) Establish a process to engage stakeholders with personal and profession experience in the subject area
4) Produce an outline of a unique case and an action plan for completing the case for use

The active learning strategies we will use are audience polling to gauge level of experience in audience members and creation of a unique case outline by each participant or group. We anticipate that 40 minutes of the 60 minutes allotted will be spent in active-learning through case creation. The remaining 20 minutes will be used to provide background and context for the activity and to describe opportunities and challenges previously encountered in case-writing by the CLARION team.