ORLANDO, Fla. — A medical student, a pharmacy student and a social-work student walked into an exam room. No joke.
They talked about their action plan, discussed their roles and decided what questions they’ll ask the asthma patient who was about to walk in.
They each approached the patient from a different perspective, and soon enough found out that asthma was just the tip of the iceberg.
The patient lived in a trailer and was constantly exposed to dust and mold. She had financial issues, had lost her spouse, was depressed.
This patient’s problems were more than just her disease.
Of course, the patient was an actor, and the students were learning an important lesson during an inter-professional workshop at University of Central Florida College of Medicine: how to work with health providers in different fields and how to ask questions beyond just their area of training.
“In the United States, health care, especially under the Affordable Care Act, is moving toward inter-professional teams. So we’re evolving medical education and inter-professional education across disciplines,” said Bonnie Yegidis, director of UCF School of Social Work at College of Health and Public Affairs.
Inter-professional education, or IPE, has become a part of curriculum for medical schools. Depending on the curriculum, medical schools work with nursing, pharmacy, physician assistant or social work programs.
At UCF, inter-professional education is in its second year, involving first-year medical students, students from University of Florida College of Pharmacy in Lake Nona, Fla., and social work students from UCF. Organizers are looking into including other disciplines like nursing in the future.
On a recent afternoon, the students from different colleges broke into teams at the Clinical Skills and Simulation Center at the UCF medical school.
Actors were all given the same detailed script, describing their ailment and their condition, and they would follow it closely as students began their examination.
The exam rooms, equipped with audio and video, allowed observers like Dr. Caridad Hernandez to watch their performance through a one-way window.
“I’m hoping part of it is developing muscle memory, so when they get together with other people, we have to identify roles, make sure they establish effective communication strategies and know what each team can bring to patient care,” said Hernandez, an associate professor at UCF College of Medicine.
After the actor patients left the dozen or so exam rooms, the students spent a few minutes to describe the patient’s issues and wrote their findings on a white board, which eventually made it to a debriefing room.
They then sat around a table, with medical, pharmacy and social-work faculty leading the discussion, and shared what they had learned.
The discussion was less about the disease process and more about how to approach the patient and how to think about the problem at hand.
There were questions about bedside manner: Should you sit or stand? What do you do when the patient cries? What do you do during a long pause? Should you hug your patient?
For some students, hearing a question from other professions was eye opening. One said he wasn’t thinking about asking the patient if she was using the asthma inhaler correctly until the pharmacy student brought it up.
“Our goal is that from the get-go they understand that they’re all colleagues that they all have to work together,” said Shannon Miller, assistant director and clinical associate professor at the Orlando Campus for UF College of Pharmacy.
