Students in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s College of Education (COE) Institute for Teacher Education and Department of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Science (KRS) recently teamed up with students from UH Mānoa Nursing in a simulated interprofessional educational (IPE) experience to collaborate on a student-athlete’s “return to learn” plan.
The goal of this Sports Concussion Injury Management IPE experience was to provide students with an opportunity to work together, learn each other’s roles and responsibilities, and collaborate to achieve a common goal. The activity focused on students from each program working together on a concussion case study in order to gain experience with the core principles of IPE using Response to Intervention.
“Communication and collaboration amongst different professions is essential for our students, patients and community member’s health, well-being and education needs,” according to the Hawaiʻi IPE planning team, which includes COE faculty members Stephanie Furuta, Kaori Tamura, Bret Freemyer, Troy Furutani, Yukiya Oba, as well as UH Mānoa Nursing’s Lorrie Wong, Sarah Pirani, Kal Peterman and Kimm Teruya.
Athletic training, nursing and Master of Education in Teaching (MEdT) students worked together to devise a plan for a student-athlete with a head concussion. The plan entailed considerations of returning to the school environment, as well as athletics with a focus on the medical condition. The students applied their collaborative skills and their discipline-specific knowledge in a simulated telehealth setting with a live actor from the UH Mānoa Department of Theatre and Dance via the UH HealthCAST program housed within the UH Translational Health Science Simulation Center (THSSC).
“IPE is a hot topic within the healthcare profession, and Lorrie Wong really is the pioneer within the state of Hawaiʻi for not only IPE, but also simulation education which provides real-life clinical experience,” said Tamura, director of the KRS Professional Athletic Training Program. “We are so grateful that she kindly responded to our request to collaborate and led the team to develop our first IPE event.”
Faculty members from MEdT, KRS and Nursing planned the collaborative simulation activity with the following core IPE goals in mind: the values and ethics for IPE, roles and responsibilities of each profession, interprofessional communication and teamwork.
“Interprofessional team collaboration is essential to providing safe quality care for the people of Hawaiʻi,” said Wong, an associate professor and director of THSSC. “This IPE simulation session expanded interprofessional education to include professions outside of the traditional groups of health professionals. This opens a new arena for our UH students to learn to work in teams with the goal to improve health outcomes for our patients.”
