profile Bridget O’Brien, phD
Rebecca Shunk, MD
Susan Janson, phd, np
Assistant Professor, Medicine
Associate Clinical Professor, Medicine-VAMC
Professor of Nursing & Medicine Mary Harms/Alumni Endowed Chair
When a medical doctor, a nurse practitioner, and a PhD in education put their minds together, monumental change can occur in how health care providers learn to deliver the best possible care for their patients. At least that is the goal of the leadership team behind the Education for Patient Aligned Care Teams, or EdPACT, Center of Excellence in Primary Care Education. For the last year, Bridget O’Brien, PhD, Director of Evaluation for EdPACT, and her colleagues have been designing and implementing an innovative model of interprofessional collaborative patient care at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. One of the stipulations of the grant that funded EdPACT was that medical and nursing professionals be trained together. That concept is a radical shift from the traditional pathway, in which nursing and medical trainees have been educated in ‘silos’ where they only talk to other nurse practitioners or other doctors, says Susan Janson, PhD, NP, the Nursing co-director of EdPACT. “They never learn how to work together that way.”
“It can be really hard for primary care providers who have been ingrained in a solo provider mind-set to change, so we are trying to get trainees to start thinking in an interprofessional teambased way as early as possible.” — Rebecca Shunk, MD Co-Director, EdPACT
For the conversation between the two groups to begin, the team had to learn about each other’s training program and they had to find a common language. “We started building interprofessional education from the ground up, beginning with building bridges between the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing,” says O’Brien, who co-authored the book Educating Physicians. Rebecca Shunk, MD, the medical director of EdPACT, emphasizes that a primary mission is to teach interprofessional collaboration through workplace learning in the clinic. The logistics include sessions on the team members’ roles and capabilities, team communication, and how to “huddle.” (medical residents, NP students, other health trainees, and clinic staff meet together to plan the care of their patients). Mirroring what they are creating in their teaching model, the EdPACT leadership team has also experienced their own evolution in the collaborative process. “We make the decisions, teach the curriculum and do all the evaluations together, and that has been an exciting experience in building interprofessional leadership of a new clinical curriculum,” says Janson.
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