Jodi Polaha, PhD
East Tennessee State University
Dr. Jodi Polaha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Assistant Director of IPE at East Tennessee State University. Dr. Polaha’s career has centered on integrating behavioral health services into primary care and she has worked in this area as a clinician, teacher/supervisor, and researcher. Currently, Dr. Polaha guides program development and evaluation/research of IPE at ETSU.
Presenting at the Nexus Summit:
The lack of interprofessional training for providers entering the healthcare system was identified as a major omission in the preparation of healthcare workers in the early 2000's. Subsequently, the World Health Organization identified a need for the development of Interprofessional education (IPE) programs to adequately prepare providers to work in teams. Since then, the pedagogy and evidence base for IPE has grown. However, there has been little focus on preparing faculty to teach from an interprofessional model. Ratka et al. conducted a literature review of articles appearing in several…
Workshop Description:East Tennessee State University has successfully integrated clinical environments into its IPE curriculum, providing over 200 students from several different health professions training programs with first hand experiences in team based care. Seven partner sites host IPE groups comprised of entry-level students, providing opportunities to interact with members of the health care team, tour the active facility and interact with a patient. Our team will discuss how we navigated complex logistics and partnerships to build these experiences into our paradigm. Attendees will…
ETSU implemented the first year of a 2-year longitudinal IPE experience within the five colleges of the ETSU Academic Health Sciences Center (AHSC). The four educational competencies of IPEC were used to create experience threads. Each semester two experience threads are covered; one consists of a simulation experience to practice the foundational principles in a safe environment, and the other a field experience to implement the foundational principle in a clinical setting. The majority of the content for experience threads and simulation experiences were implemented for three cohorts of…