The Preceptor’s Guide to the Nexus: Supporting the Role of Preceptors in Optimizing the Interprofessional Clinical Learning Environment

Project overview:
Health systems are faced with a dual challenge of “optimizing learning and patient care”, while preparing health professions learners for interprofessional, integrated team-based care and collaboration (NCICLE, 2019, p. 4). Clinical preceptors occupy an important space at the nexus between interprofessional education and collaborative practice, but most were trained in a specific discipline with traditional roles and chains of command, and learned how to practice in teams through “example, trial, and error” (Kennedy, 2018, p. 7). As a result, health professions learners enter a siloed, hierarchical clinical learning environment. To achieve an optimal interprofessional clinical learning environment (IP-CLE), clinicians, clinical faculty, and health educators recommend introducing tools, programs, and “key components” of models of IPE (NCICLE, 2019, p. 18).

The Preceptor’s Guide to the Nexus: Where Interprofessional Education Meets Collaborative Practice (CAIPER, 2018), is designed to support the vital role of the preceptor seeking to transform a practice site into an IP-CLE. The guide is the result of a university/community partnership to develop interprofessional clinical learning in primary care, outpatient clinic, transitional care, integrated care, and federally qualified health center pilot sites. Site visits and interviews with preceptors and students over a two-year period led to the identification of core and site-specific tailored approaches to interprofessional collaborative practice.

The guide is intended to support the important role of preceptors in advancing learner competencies through guided, intentional experiences within an IP-CLE. It is useful to healthcare organizations seeking to interprofessionalize their team culture, and can serve as a resource for health professions educators seeking to infuse current healthcare trends and challenges into health professions curriculum.

Describe resource/outcomes to be shared:
o Orient preceptors to the historical context of IPE
o Introduce terms, concepts, and core competencies related to IPE
o Identify core and site-specific interprofessional activities
o Describe how to transform uni-professional student learning into an interprofessional activity

Describe how participants will be able to apply the knowledge gained once back in their own environment:

The guide is available online as a free, open educational resource (OER). Its electronic format facilitates timely updates and easy accessibility regardless of location.