Interprofessional education at UMKC’s health sciences schools has spawned an interprofessional competition.
Nearly 50 students from the schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy worked together as members of nine interprofessional teams putting their combined skills to the test in the first Interprofessional Education and Collaboration Healthcare Reasoning Competition.
The daylong, case-based simulation competition took place in conjunction with the fifth-annual Interprofessional Education Faculty Symposium at the School of Medicine. It was the brainchild of a smaller group of seven students from different disciplines who formed a UMKC IPE Student Interest Group to promote interprofessional education.
“This started with the IPE interest group,” said Stefanie Ellison, M.D., IPE coordinator for the School of Medicine. “Seven or eight student were really interested in this. It was their energy that made it happen and everything fell in place.”
Members of the student interest group include Morgan Beard, Vincent Cascone, Maggie Kirwin, Grant Randall, Alie Reinbold, Mitchell Solano, and Robert Weidling.
Weidling said the group developed the competition after taking part in a similar event at Creighton University. The team spent the next eight months working on the structure of the competition. Ellison and Emily Hillman, M.D., assistant program director and clerkship director for emergency medicine, and faculty sponsor for the school’s Sim Wars team, provided faculty guidance.
“The most important goal of our event was to help students understand the importance of interprofessional teamwork,” Weidling said. “We wanted students to be put into a position where they were forced to augment their weaknesses with the strengths of the other interprofessional students, such as relying on pharmacy students to employ complex pharmacological treatment plans, medicine students to produce a robust differential diagnosis, and nursing students to craft care plans.”
For the competition. At least two different schools were represented on each team of five to six students. Each team was given a case with pertinent patient history and vital statistics, then given 90 minutes to prepare a treatment plan using their personal skills and other resources, such as Internet access. After 90-minute, teams gave 10-minute presentations to an interprofessional panel of judges made up of faculty from the health sciences schools. Each presentation offered the team’s treatment plan for the patient and how the team worked together to develop the plan.
The top four teams from the first round of competition were then given a new, unique case to prepare without using any outside resources.
Teams were evaluated on skills such as collaboration, demonstration of medical knowledge, ability to manage health-care decision and using their individual roles and responsibilities, and use of evidence-based medicine.
Ellison said the winning teams maximized their roles.
“Their knowledge and the skill sets of each team member allowed them to best take care of the patient,” she said. “That’s how we function every day.”
Weidling said the students enjoyed the event and that group is already planning for the next competition with hopes of creating a regional event for health sciences school throughout the midwest.
“The most common comment I heard was that all of the interprofessional team members felt valued and left with a greater appreciation of what each of our varying medical disciplines do,” Weidling said.
The top four winning teams selected by the judges were:
First Place: Isioma Amayo, medicine; Assadulah (Asad) Helal, medicine; Diana Jun, medicine; Rattanaporn (Gift) Malitong, pharmacy; Hanna Miller, nursing; Ashley (Kate) Ragan, pharmacy.
Second Place: Ma Chu, pharmacy; Jordann Dhuse, medicine; Mallory Matter, nursing; Tjeoma Onyema, pharmacy; Minh Vuong-Dac, medicine.
Third Place: Kristine Brungardt, nursing;Hayley Byers, nursing; Tom Green, medicine; Angela Kaucher, pharmacy; Alex Poppen, pharmacy.
Fourth Place: Jess Belyew, nursing; Bowers, nursing; Matt Buswell, dentistry; Emily Herndon, nursing; Amber Reinert, pharmacy.
