Coach Training Program: Guiding Interprofessional Student Teams to Learn Collaborative Care Team-skills

Teaching collaborative care team skills to students is an on-going challenge. At Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) a program has been developed which places early learner student teams in clinical and community settings, known as Interprofessional Learning Experience and Practice (ILEAP). The student teams, like professional health care teams, do not remember to stop to huddle or regularly give each other feedback. Although student teams are required to reflect upon their team skills at the end of each session, they originally did not seem to understand how to remain aware of, and practice team skills during the task of patient/client care. This led to superficial reflection on teamwork, and although working together was meaningful the faculty team did not observe skill development.

Coaching has long been identified as an effective means to improve teams in the business world. The ILEAP team developed a coaching program to provide guidance and formative feedback to the interprofessional student teams to optimize learning in the clinical environment. The program consists of training senior students, faculty or staff and consists of 1) the IPE competencies and uniqueness of interprofessional team interactions 2) team skills training; how to identify successful versus poor team behavior utilizing a tool created by the team at CWRU, Direct Observation of Team Interactions (DOTI) and, 3) how to ‘coach’ through leading the student team to identify and correct their own behaviors. The coaches focus on specific team skills, encourage reflective learning and utilize tools such as the huddle.

The program places a trained coach to observe and coach student teams in the clinical or community setting for 3-5 sessions. Challenges consist primarily of logistics and successes consist of improvement in the student teams focus on skills, effective reflection, and utilization of team tools.

This work is supported by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.