How many times have you heard the phrase in the hospital, “Do these people even talk to each other?” Often times, patients are surprised by the lack of communication between healthcare professionals. This can negatively impact patient safety due to the lack of critical information, misinterpretation of information and unclear orders. Furthermore, not knowing the scope of other healthcare professionals leads to not being able to address all of the patient’s concerns leading to poorer patient outcomes. Hence, the Program for Interprofessional Practice, Education and Research (PIPER) at my university organizes an Interprofessional Practice Education (IPE) day every year.
This day is hosted to promote further interprofessional collaboration amongst healthcare workers. Throughout the day we worked in groups of students from the medical, physiotherapy, child life studies, nursing, midwifery, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, and the health sciences program. The objectives of this event were to learn about the scope of practice of other healthcare professionals, how to involve other professionals in patient care and to facilitate an open discussion about how this collaboration can improve patient care.
We began the day with watching 2 videos one on empathy and the other on patient safety, participated in a communication challenge, then spent time in small groups discussing various topics about each other’s professions and ended the day with a panel discussion from the Pediatric Chronic Pain Interprofessional Team. This was organized to provide us with a real-life example of the value of interprofessional care. Over the next couple of posts, I will be discussing specific activities from the day that were instrumental to my learning.
