"Healthcare professionals are trained in silos, but we ask them to work in teams," says Dr. Karyn Baum, associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Nurses, doctors, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals often understand little about each other's scope of practice. It's a bit like requiring the sections of an orchestra to rehearse in separate rooms and then asking them to perform as a unified ensemble.
Getting Acquainted
To remedy this situation, Baum and her colleagues in the U of M Academic Health Center (www.ahc.umn.edu) have created a course on interprofessional teamwork for students in nursing, medicine, pharmacy, healthcare administration, dentistry and social work.
Students learn how other clinicians are educated and what role they play on the healthcare team. They also learn about the differences between a stable team of professionals who have worked together for years and a temporary team that comes together for an event like an emergency C-section.
In addition, students experience a simulated emergency, during which they must work with team members in other disciplines, and analyze a real-life medical error.
Effective Communication
Students are taught to practice "closed-loop" communication. For example, a surgeon being gowned before entering the operating room might say to the nurse, "I want two units of blood on hand." The nurse verifies this by repeating, "You want two units of blood, and I'm going to order it."
Students also learn that in a well-functioning team, everyone - even those who see themselves as low-ranking - has to feel comfortable sharing information. For example, if a medical student flipping through the chart sees that the patient is allergic to a medication, it has to be OK for that student to speak up if the physician prescribes the medication by mistake.
