Promoting interprofessional education in public health through volunteer activites

A major barrier to providing interprofessional education in public health is the competition for time in the curricula of the multiple health professions. Joint degree programs and certificate programs can offer motivated students exposure to public health in interprofessional academic settings. The demands of the degree, however, may limit student participation. Scholarly service learning projects provide a time-limited and volunteer alternative venue for developing and deploying interprofessional teams of interested students and faculty. In this presentation, we will describe two recent projects conducted by our public health program—a community interventions grant review project for Healthy People 2020 and a community based needs assessment survey conducted on behalf of a local free clinic. Both projects involved recruiting, training, supervising, and debriefing interprofessional teams of students and faculty from our medical, nursing, health professions, and graduate schools. Lessons learned at each stage in the process will be identified. The projects were successful in fielding interprofessional teams to deliver the proposed end products to our community partners. The projects were also successful in introducing students to the ways in which clinical medicine and public health are interrelated. A number of student participants subsequently joined the student Public Health Organization and/or enrolled in Public Health Tracks within their health professions curricula.