Interprofessional clinical experiences (IPCE) for teams of healthcare students are necessary to enhance student competence in communicating and collaborating with other health professionals.  In any setting, educators must strive for IPCE activities that foster quality interactions among professional students and patients.  With funding from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, Case Western Reserve University has developed and implemented the Interprofessional Learning Exchange and Practice model, ILEAP.   The overall project goal of ILEAP is to refine, implement and test a scalable model for interprofessional clinical education that 1) creates opportunities for interprofessional student teams to provide added value for clinical partners, patients and population health; and 2) supports an understanding of clinical site components that enhance interprofessional learning. ILEAP strategies to meet these objectives are the focus of the workshop activities which are designed to engage attendees in discussion and practice to enhance their own interprofessional clinical learning environment.  

 ILEAP places teams of five students at either inpatient or outpatient clinical sites.  Student team members are from Medicine, Advanced Practice Nursing (APN), Dental, Social Work, and Physician Assistant (PA) programs. Students are first or second year learners. Through a collaborative design, clinical site partners identify a ‘gap in care’ project that student teams address by interacting with patients using screening questions, health promotion and care referrals.   Students summarize findings and report back to the partner with suggestions, successes or activities.  Team learning is strengthened through consistent curriculum components targeted to team skills, simulation and feedback; the project is assessed through a multi-method evaluation design. 

Over the past 18 months, the development and implementation of ILEAP student teams has provided significant insights to optimize the students’ clinical and teamwork experiences. Insights and practices for the identification and solutions to clinic site barriers, key components of meaningful team experiences, and the opportunities for student teams to add value will be shared by the presenters.  

Learning Objectives:

After participation in this workshop, attendees will be able to:

• Identify approaches to develop meaningful clinical IPE experiences for their students.  
  Description: Presenters will share examples of core experiences at the site and the consistent team curriculum across sites that enables meaningful, skill-enhancing IPE experiences.
• Describe examples of collaborative approaches for clinical site readiness and engagement. Description: Attendees will learn practical aspects of the protocol for working through clinical site readiness to accept IP teams and to identify the design of the team’s clinical involvement and added value at the site.
• Identify barriers to clinical site engagement.
  Description: List the steps in facilitating the paradigm shift clinical sites must experience to successfully incorporate interprofessional teams of early student learners.

Active learning strategies for workshop attendees include an opportunity to: 

• Discuss and critique a case study of an IP student team site project
• Synthesize presented strategies with personal experiences in a think-pair-share activity to describe a real-world application for attendees’ settings.