IPE Interactive Experiences

P1 Public Health Event

In this mock public-health event, first-year pharmacy students collaborate with nurse practitioner, nursing, and epidemiology students to provide patient-centered care in a response to a local reportable disease outbreak.  By providing care for a standardized patient, team members learn how each profession contributes to the patient care process.  Students also learn about their professional reporting responsibilities in a disease outbreak and interact with epidemiology students to understand the investigation process to track and minimize the spread of disease.

PAP2 Longitudinal and Physical Assessment

This interprofessional education event introduces second-year pharmacy students to the ways in which physician assistants approach physical assessment and render a diagnosis based on the patient’s history, current complaints, and symptomatology. The PAP2 session takes place in an outpatient setting and allows pharmacy and physician assistant students to work as a team caring for patients over the course of a year. This collaborative effort helps each profession gain an appreciation of the other’s thought processes when assessing a patient’s status and developing a plan to manage and/or resolve the diagnosis. Using a team approach takes advantage of each profession’s strengths with the goal of improving the efficiency and optimizing the delivery of direct patient care.

P3 Values and Ethics

This session is designed to allow third-year pharmacy and second-year medical students from over 5 different campuses the opportunity to interact and carry out their roles in a cooperative healthcare setting. Several scenarios are presented requiring learners to react to ethically challenging patient situations involving various healthcare providers.   Students will explore and discuss various considerations from the standpoint of their specific professional expectations and seek to understand the position of the other parties involved.   Several tools and templates will be presented to give student practitioners options on how to navigate successfully through the various scenarios. The desired outcome is for students to develop the decision-making skills needed to analyze similar situations in the future and make decisions based on a better understanding of the guiding principles, values and practice standards of the various parties (healthcare colleagues, patients, and families) involved and their respective professions.

Fall Interprofessional Day Event

A dedicated day to build relationships with three other colleges within the USG system.  Pharmacy students join medicine, social work, nurse practitioner, and nursing students to work as a team in managing simulated patients.  Traditionally the case encompasses contemporary issues seen within our community and allows the team members to learn the strengths of each profession while also increasing their clinical knowledge.  The dialogue with other professional students helps the pharmacy student gain confidence and increased understanding of the role pharmacists play within the healthcare team.  The session also includes a keynote speaker associated with the clinical problem covered in the case, allowing the presenter to build upon the need for team work in modern day healthcare.  In the end, the goal is that students from four professions get to meet and gain understanding of the others’ professional paths prior to interacting with other healthcare professionals during rotations throughout the state.

Interprofessional Approach to Simulated Care Elective

This elective course is designed to prepare third-year pharmacy students (P3s)  for Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences and for providing direct patient care in the clinical setting.  The IPE course emphasizes the necessity of working within a team when caring for patients, providing opportunities for P3s to work side-by-side with second-year medical students (M2s) in managing simulated patients in an acute setting by being involved in therapeutic decision-making at the point of care.  This occurs during three interprofessional education-driven simulation experiences in collaboration with M2 students utilizing the Simulation Center located on the Augusta University/UGA Partnership campus.  The experiences are supplemented with lectures to discuss the topic of each simulation and debriefs post session. In addition, there are lectures, case-based discussions, and role modeling on team dynamics, communication, managing conflict, and how to approach patients as a team.

For more information contact:

Dr. Timothy R. Brown,
Director of Interprofessional Pharmacy
Office: 706-542-1228
timothy.brown@uga.edu