Integrating Interprofessional Learners in High-Risk Surgical Patient Care

Drs. Emily Finlayson and Jennifer Kaplan received the Innovations Funding for Education Award for their proposal: ‘Integrating Interprofessional Learners in High Risk Surgical Patient Care’.  Funded by the Academy of Medical Educators Innovation Program, the UCSF Library & Center for Knowledge Management/UCSF Program in Interprofessional Education, and Tideswell at UCSF, their novel new education model links trainee learning with future practice of highly interdisciplinary care of older surgical patients. This longitudinal curriculum for early medical and nurse practitioner students embeds them into the interprofessional prehabilitation team in a way that complements the greater UCSF geriatric surgery initiative.  Learners will be active contributors - team members in the clinic, participating in basic patient information gathering (e.g., history-taking and physical examination) and as patient education health coaches during transitions of care to hospitalization and home.

The program gives early medical and nurse practitioner students the rare opportunity to participate in surgical, team-based workplace learning and places students in a clinical group designed to encourage participation and foster collaboration as a true interprofessional team.  Students will follow their own panel of patients across multiple phases of care, making the program the first workplace-learning pilot of its kind.  The program results will be included in the UCSF Center for Surgery in Older Adults clinical registry, which will be used to study the impact of student activities on patient care outcomes. This relationship has never been studied outside of the domain of free student-run clinics.