No abstract

Today's global society is increasingly diverse and complex requiring resiliency to successfully navigate challenges in the workplace. Health care educators are charged with the task of developing curriculum that is highly engaging while also preparing students to address the challenges of providing safe and effective care to increasingly ill patients within complex integrated healthcare systems. Central to their success as learners and future practitioners will be the development of grit: The ability to be diligent, hardworking, and able to remain positive despite setbacks. Interprofessional education develops grit by tapping into intrinsic motivation and provides a new modality for the development of 21 st century skills and competencies of teamwork, collaboration, communication, and ethical reasoning. The article will provide a discussion of IPE as a venue for promoting grit as well as developing intrinsic motivation in today's 21 st century healthcare students. Interprofessional Education: Building Student Resilience and Grit through Teamwork Keywords:Interprofessional education, Grit, Teamwork Expert OpinionOpen Access IntroductionToday's healthcare environment is complex, fast-paced, and demanding requiring students and staff to have grit to successfully collaborate in an interprofessional team. Health professional students must learn how to be resilient. They learn core knowledge, skills, attitudes and values and are asked to quickly apply learning to a clinical or professional setting. Students' ability to move from receiving direct instruction to clinical practice is facilitated through multiple learning experiences including supervised interprofessional training in simulation, experiential opportunities, and co-curricular settings that develop practitioner resilience, and grit, which predicts and is necessary for long term success. This paper describes interprofessional education (IPE) as a means of promoting grit and resiliency to prepare healthcare students for long term professional success. Grit Predicts SuccessA major factor in predicting success in a student's education and professional development is the concept of grit. Grit is the ability to remain resilient in pursuing goals despite setbacks or encountered hardships [1,2]. Interprofessional education (IPE) engages students in intrinsically motivating experiences that can promote grit through significant and challenging learning that develops required proficiency in teamwork, ethical decision making, understanding of roles, and interdisciplinary communication [3,4,5]. These learned skills have been recognized as key 21st century attributes for success nationally and internationally by educators and employers and are now a central focus of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative Report [3]. While the IPEC Report is supported by nearly all of the health profession educator associations and accreditors in the United States of America [6], the majority of educational programs continue to provide healthcare training and education in s...

The World Health Organization recommends interprofessional training for health care students to create a collaborative practice-ready workforce. Yet students in health profession programs remain educated in silos, and communication problems among health care personnel have been implicated as a cause of most patient errors by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, Institute of Medicine, and Joint Commission. These organizations recommend that health care professionals receive training in educational programs that develop effective interdisciplinary communication skills. The purpose of this mixed methods pilot study was to assess student learning from a newly implemented interprofessional simulation scenario that addressed identification and management of patients with swallowing difficulties. The authors recruited 45 nursing and speech-language pathology students. Two instruments were used to measure quantitative outcomes including the Simulation Design Scale and the Student Satisfaction and Self Confidence in Learning questionnaire. The results were statistically significant for both surveys. Qualitative data were obtained during simulation debriefing sessions, and were coded and analyzed. Two emergent themes indicated that IPE simulation experiences are valued by students from both disciplines. The authors recommend incorporating IPE simulation in the curriculum for health care educational programs. Research ArticleOpen Access IntroductionStudents in health profession programs are traditionally educated in silos. Upon graduation, they are expected to function as part of a health care team, collaborating with others to care for patients from admission to discharge. It is hard to imagine a winning team composed of individuals with complementary and essential skills who have not practiced working together.Communication problems among health care personnel have been implicated as a cause of most patient errors (American Association of Colleges of Nurses [1][2][3][4]. The Joint Commission [5,6] According to the WHO [8], interprofessional education (IPE) involves teaching and training students how to learn about, from and with each other using interprofessional teams (Figure 1). IPE purportedly trains safe health care professionals who are ready to work in collaborative health care teams resulting in improved patient health outcomes [9]. Further, IPE is highly recommended by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [10] as well as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. See figure 2 for additional benefits resulting from IPE [8].Nurses and other disciplines are constantly faced with the challenge of handling providing care to patients with dysphagia. If not properly diagnosed, one major risk includes aspiration pneumonia which has an extensive impact on health with regard to morbidity, cost, and mortality [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Up to 15% -30% of pneumonia cases in hospitalized patients is due to aspiration [11][12][13]. According to the ICD-9 code * Corresponding Author: D...

Providing education and partner training for the primary communication partners of persons with aphasia is often challenging for medical-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Today's healthcare environment is fraught with barriers to obtaining services for individuals with aphasia and their significant others. This article describes a proposed alternative service delivery model for the partners of persons with aphasia.

This article describes Communication Recovery Groups (CRG), an aphasia group program that is sponsored by a medical setting and more recently a university setting. CRG's history and approach and its model of service in light of current healthcare challenges are summarized. The article also provides a detailed discussion regarding the logistics of offering conversation groups to persons with aphasia which are sponsored by medical and/or university settings, the intake process for new group members, and the training of student volunteers to help lead conversation groups.