Interprofessional clinical experiences during the undergraduate educational training of health professions students are imperative for developing an understanding of how interprofessional teams can and do function in real-world clinical environments. In order to ensure student experiences are occurring in environments that exemplify interprofessional collaborative practice, educators must create clinical partnerships and develop unique interprofessional learning experiences for students through structured activities within the clinical setting. Aligned with the Nexus goals to support the development and documentation of outcomes that correlate interprofessional education and interprofessional practice programs to the Triple Aim, this workshop will explore one method to identify and engage clinical partners and develop structured activities within clinical settings that promote collaboration-readiness among health professions students to improve patient care and outcomes.

By attending this workshop, learners will be able to:

• Describe the design of an interprofessional clinical practicum course
• Discuss student learning outcomes related to the ability to identify, describe, and demonstrate principles of effective team-based care
• Identify strategies to develop clinical partnerships and structured activities for students that enhance learning outcomes and support continuous improvement of team-based care in clinical practice

The integration of the clinical practicum course in interprofessional education (IPE) curriculum expands the student’s foundational IPE learning beyond the classroom and into health care clinics that effectively demonstrate team-based care. The focus of this course is on actual interaction with interprofessional teams in a clinical setting. Multiple settings within hospitals, health care organizations, and community settings are utilized to enable students to gain experience assessing how different interprofessional teams function, and the environmental and personal attributes that contribute to effective teams working together to improve patient care and outcomes.

A key component of this course is establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial clinical partnerships. In these agreements, clinical partners provide learning experiences for students to observe and reflect on their foundational IPE knowledge. In return, clinical partners have access to the Center for Interprofessional Education and Research resources, support for efforts to improve team-based care, and gain perspective on their team-based care model from student’s observations. This workshop will share a model of an interprofessional clinical practicum and the successful strategies in developing clinical partnerships. Attendees will be given content that has led to successfully integrating this course into existing IPE curriculum and that is currently used to engage and develop clinical partnerships. These resources include course syllabus, Google site template, clinical partnership infographic, clinical site profile template, and samples of student reflections.

The active learning strategies will include:

• Small group discussion to identify application of IPEC Core Competencies within course
• Peer-to-peer interview to simulate student learner experience during in-class discussion
• Complete strategic planning activity to identify and plan engagement with potential clinical partners; this includes identifying structured learning activities and methods of sharing student observations with clinical partners

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