The Passport Project: From Practice to Prepared Clinician

Interprofessional healthcare practices are fundamental to safe and effective patient care in the modern healthcare setting. This poster will summarize a qualitative research study of student reflections from the IPE 001 IPE Passport Activities during fall 2017/spring 2018.

Creighton University’s IPE 001 course includes 9 professions with 464 students completing the post-course evaluation survey in its first year of implementation. Students chose from a wide menu of IPE Passport activities from didactic to clinical learning. De-identified student data was downloaded from the learning management system. Data was themed and coded according to qualitative research protocol. Three principal themes emerged: theme 1- Establishing a fundamental understanding of the roles held by team members leads to better patient care outcomes; theme 2- Interprofessional education prepares learners for future collaborative practices; and theme 3- Learners identify skills necessary for interprofessional collaboration: empathy, openness, communication, and valuing others' perspectives and knowledge.

Future research should look at systems in healthcare that are dedicated to interprofessional education. Research is necessary to understand the lack, need, and results of establishing such systems to continue the education and collaboration that health professional students are learning now and can continue in their career. It should be further explored how IPE can continue intentionally into the workforce. Students were taken by surprise by the knowledge held among other health professional students, and how this knowledge is necessary in providing effective patient care. This alluded to the idea that students recognized the need to engage collaboration, which allowed for each student and their respective field of study to engage in the work necessary to provide holistic patient care.