Breaking down barriers: An interprofessional course in Communications

Breaking down barriers: An interprofessional course in Communications

The complexity of today's health care challenges requires the broad perspective provided by an interprofessional approach to education. One of the keys in addressing these challenges is effective communication between health care professionals as often little communication occurs among them despite the fact that they are caring for the same patients (IOM, 2003). Too often the communication is fraught with tension, territoriality and misconceptions. This presentation describes a required interprofessional communications course that medical, nursing and pharmacy students take together in an effort to enhance professional collegiality and to mitigate interprofessional miscommunication and conflict.

In order to present the didactic content, the course incorporates required communication modules that include multiple video-recorded interviews that provide student exposure to patient-centered interviewing skills. Students spend the majority of the course in small interprofessional skills groups facilitated by a faculty member from one of the professions. A mid-term and final exam using the Objective Structured Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) method allows comparison of communication performance of the students.

The presentation will highlight the incentives for initiating the course and methods of faculty development. In addition, a discussion of course outcomes will include a comparison of student performance, student course evaluations, faculty evaluations as well as faculty feedback and satisfaction. Issues related to the challenge of contextualizing the communication scenarios will be discussed as well as other barriers related to engaging students and faculty from multiple professions. Benefits for the Colleges, students and faculty will be emphasized.