Vol 1 no.1 | August 2013
Meet our Faculty Scholar
Lyn Gum, who is based at the Rural Clinical School (FURCS) in Renmark is the Faculty of Health Sciences Scholar for 2013. Lyn until recently, worked as a Lecturer in Rural Interprofessional Education (IPE) in the School of Medicine. Currently she is busy writing up her PhD which is in the field of interprofessional education and practice. The University’s Faculty Scholar initiative aims to encourage development and innovation in learning and teaching across the University. The Scholar is encouraged to take a leadership role over their one year appointment, contributing to the enhancement of learning and teaching as well as the quality of the student experience. Lyn’s goal has been to build on last year’s Faculty Scholar Iris Lindemann’s work in IPE. This has led to the development of a Faculty Development Program called TIPS – Teaching for Interprofessional Practice and Skills. The educational sessions are designed to assist educators, both academic and clinical, to become more knowledgeable about IPE and to be able to integrate it into their teaching. Although Lyn acknowledges that she is not an expert
in IPE she has immersed herself in the IPE philosophy since 2009, when IPE became a part of her role at FURCS.
Claire Verrall, Adrian Schoo and Brenton Kortman has assisted to cofacilitate the workshops.
Whilst IPE can be thought of as an extra load or layer of complexity to already full curricula, Lyn’s approach is that it should be a concept that is treated just like any other. For example, if students need to integrate their recently acquired knowledge and skills into the workplace, ‘work-integrated learning’ is included in their program. Therefore if we really want our students to have an understanding and appreciation of other health professional roles they need to be immersed into a session where they can learn with, from and about each other. This does not need to occur on a regular basis, but rather, be introduced at intervals throughout their program and each time at a level that allows for building a gradual understanding and application of how to be interprofessional. The overall aim is to have Flinders graduates who are collaboration ready.
Nearly all the workshops have been completed with each of the sessions attended by clinical educators from local health services along with academic staff. Having both health service staff and University staff at the workshops means that agreement can be reached on how to best meet the needs of our students. Each session has offered a variety of perspectives and discussion. The evaluations have been extremely positive to date and research data collected thus far indicates that TIPS is making a difference. For example, one research participant reflected on the mix of clinicians and academics attending together; “It gets people talking about it [IPE]. It makes me feel more confident to say ‘we need to teach it here’ because it is being practised outside.” (Series 2, Interview)
Lyn is undertaking a pilot research project alongside the TIPS educational sessions to investigate the effectiveness of the workshops and report ideas, achievements, challenges and lessons learnt from the workshop activities. She is particularly interested in looking at the relationship between professional academic identity and curriculum change, so the research project will monitor changes in educators’ perceptions or willingness to make changes to teaching and/or curriculum. Importantly the project will identify key lessons learnt and determine critical success factors for teachers and professional development. A team of skilled facilitators including Donald Bramwell, Linda Sweet, Iris Lindemann, Anna Vnuk, Sharon Lawn,
Lyn says “I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to be a Faculty Scholar as this helps me to build my career in the area of interprofessional education and practice, as well as assist educators to reflect on their current teaching methods and look at ways they can improve the quality of their teaching with the students’ best interests at heart”. Lyn is happy to speak to anyone who is interested in learning more about the Faculty Scholar initiative, IPE or who would like to attend TIPS in 2013. lyn.gum@flinders.edu.au