Professional health care is increasingly a team activity. The University of Missouri-Kansas City health sciences schools are making learning a team activity as well.

Each year, students from the schools of medicine, dentistry, nursing and pharmacy gather to participate in a series of learning events as part of UMKC Health Sciences Interprofessional Education Program. Nearly 450 students from the schools filled 49 classrooms and lecture halls across the campus on Sept. 7 to take part in small group discussions on health disparities, focusing on their particular roles in meeting patient needs.

“Developing a culture of interprofessional practice and collaboration is a goal of our health professions campus in order to provide safe and high-quality care for our patients in Kansas City,” said Stefanie Ellison, associate dean for learning initiatives at the School of Medicine and a co-coordinator of the IPE program.

In February, students met in Interprofessional Medical Patient Advocacy and Collaborative Teams, or IMPACTS, for the first time and completed a small group, case-based activity on roles and responsibilities. This September event is the second time they met in the same IMPACTs and they were assigned a project prior to the case-based activity.  Each group was given a list of 10 areas of need such as transportation, housing, child care, job assistance or finances that can limit the ability of the lower-income and underserved populations to obtain needed health care. The groups were to research five different areas of need and come back with a list of resources to help meet those needs in material they could present to their own patients.

“It is our goal to improve their learning and utilization of resources to address the health disparities or social determinates of health in Kansas City,” Ellison said.

Hunter Faris, a third-year medical student who participated in the IPE program last year, served as one of the small group facilitators this year.

“We’re talking about the social determinants of health and how our particular fields can tackle those issues,” Faris said. “This is more about what can we really provide a patient in an effective manner where we’re not being redundant. This is helping us learn to better work as a team.”

The health sciences IPE program consists of other events including a Poverty Simulation that will take place in September and October and an annual IPE competition in the spring in which small groups of students from the different schools work together to address case-based patient scenarios and in front of a panel of judges.

“These IPE events are beneficial because we understand what the other health professionals can provide and how we’re able to work together to provide care for our patients,” Faris said.

Interprofessional education is implemented as part of the required curriculum across the UMKC health professions programs to meet their program accreditation requirements.

In Kansas City, nearly one in five residents live below the poverty line — a harsh reality shared by many patients UMKC students see on Hospital Hill and beyond.

To better understand the challenges and frustrations of those living in poverty, students participated in a large-scale poverty simulation, part of the Interprofessional Education (IPE) program on the UMKC Health Sciences campus.

In November, more than 100 UMKC medical, nursing, pharmacy and dental students, along with faculty and volunteers, joined to experience the virtual realities of poverty and its effects on patients. The simulation was designed to incorporate IPE, an emerging teaching approach addressing the future of health care, in which a close-knit team of dentists, physicians, nurses and pharmacists provides personalized, integrated attention to patients.

In the simulation, one of five such sessions this fall, students role-played living for a month in poverty, with each “week” lasting 15 minutes. The goals were to keep their home, pay all bills, hold down jobs and feed their family and children each day – all while managing issues such as an illness in the family, a stolen car and expenses to repair their plumbing.

Students could rely on stations around the room, such as employers, a grocery store, a health care center, social services, a pawn shop and a quick cash outlet, to help them meet their goals. Following the simulation, the group members spent time sharing their experiences and discussing lessons learned.

”It was sad to realize that all my time was spent thinking about just getting the minimum needs taken care of, and that sometimes even the minimum isn’t enough,” one student said.

Interim Chancellor and Provost Barbara A. Bichelmeyer addressed the participants after observing the simulation. She noted that the first place people went was the employer, and that many sought help from the pawn shop rather than turning to other resources. And the one station that didn’t get much business? The medical center, a point not lost on the room full of future health-care providers.

“Today’s program shows poverty is not about people not being well-intentioned, but about people not being well-resourced,” Bichelmeyer said.

The simulation, created by the Missouri Association for Community Action, was created to help people — such as future health-care providers — understand the challenges of living in poverty day to day. It lets participants look at poverty from a variety of angles and then discuss the potential for change within their communities.

The UMKC Health Sciences IPE program is directed by Stefanie Ellison, associate dean for learning initiatives at the UMKC School of Medicine and emergency physician at Truman Medical Centers; and Valerie Ruehter, director of experiential learning and clinical assistant professor for the UMKC School of Pharmacy.

According to Ellison, who coordinated the simulation with Ruehter, the day purposely included data about poverty in Missouri.

“The activity is very personal and designed to have students walk in the shoes of someone in poverty,” Ellison said. “The takeaway is to empathize with our patients and learn very specifically about the problems our patients face.”

Ruehter agrees.

“We sometimes get frustrated when our patients aren’t doing what we asked them to do or don’t show up for clinic appointments,” Ruehter said. “This is an opportunity for students to come together and wear the other shoe, to see that it’s not always as easy as we think it might be. We can create individual practitioners, but in health care today, it takes an entire team to create positive patient outcomes. With IPE, we give students the chance to become familiar with what every discipline brings to the table, which hopefully will make a more seamless health care system.”

That’s a goal of IPE, Ellison said. “If we have our students learning in silos, but they are expected on day one in practice to begin working together as a team, then we haven’t really done our job. At UMKC, we are breaking down those silos.”

At the conclusion of the simulation, students heard a call to action: to do more, learn more, go where the patients are and ask how you can help change the system, even a little bit.

“If what we do at UMKC is to help our health-care professionals in the future think about the humanness of the people they are working with, both their peers and their patients, then I think we will have made a really significant contribution,” Bichelmeyer said.

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.

More than 500 students from the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s four health sciences schools — dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy — gathered across the health sciences campus on Feb. 19 to gain a better understanding of each other’s roles and responsibilities as health care providers. The day marked the beginning of the third year of a campus-wide interprofessional education program.

Health professions programs across the country have accreditation standards to provide activities for students to learn with, from and about one another so that they are practice ready to provide safe, team-based care. School of Medicine Associate Dean for Curriculum Stefanie Ellison, M.D., one of the event coordinators, said the interprofessional education program at UMKC has achieved those standards with its series of activities spread throughout yearly activities within each professional program.

“All of these programs have their own accreditation requirements for interprofessional education,” Ellison said. “With our curriculum, we believe we’re now meeting all of those requirements.”

The afternoon-long activity focused the students’ attention on how to provide patient care in a safe manner.

Students from the School of Medicine’s anesthesiologist assistant and physician assistant programs participated in the program along with third-year students in the M.D. program. Students from all of the health sciences programs were divided into groups of 10 to participate in the first of this year’s three collaborative learning activities. A second group activity is planned for next September with a focus on ethics and values. The third group session focusing on interprofessional communication and teams and teamwork will follow in October or November.

The IPE activities occur annually so that all health professions students in ten programs will gain skills and attitudes in interprofessional practice as they contribute in all three events before obtaining their professional degrees.

Ellison said IPE coordinators at UMKC’s heath sciences schools are also working on events such as service learning projects and other activities that can be embedded into each school’s curriculum to create an on-going practice of interprofessional collaborative learning.