University of Michigan’s 11-member IPE Foundations Experience Team received the 2019 Midwest Interprofessional Practice, Education, and Research Center (MIPERC) Demonstration Model Award.

“This Demonstration Model Award reflects the quality of University of Michigan faculty who are involved in our IPE efforts,” said Frank Ascione, Director of the Michigan Center for Interprofessional Education (IPE), who nominated the U-M team for the award. “It also symbolizes our emphasis on innovative solutions to teaching IPE principles to our large and diverse group of health science students.”

The multifaceted U-M IPE foundational experience is scalable and overcomes challenges of time and place across U-M’s three campuses (Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn). It incorporates asynchronous instruction and interprofessional interaction (the faculty-directed online Introduction IPE Module) along with synchronous classroom intraprofessional discussion. This activity is followed by a large face-to-face event called IPE in Action, in which teams of students from different professions discuss a complex patient case at tables with a faculty member. Each of these two instructional activities involve well over a thousand students and dozens of faculty. And IPE in Action is believed to be the largest gathering of faculty and students in the same spot on the U-M Ann Arbor campus; it is held in Crisler basketball arena. The foundations program provides health professions students with their first formal IPE exposure, introducing them to the competencies needed to practice collaboratively in clinical and community settings. Preliminary analysis indicates that students’ knowledge and attitudes across schools and for each school individually improved significantly for the key IPE domains (roles/responsibilities, teams/teamwork, and patient-centered care) after completing the online module and participating in the face-to-face event.

“This is the best team that I have ever had the privilege to work with,” said Laura Smith, PhD, DPT, Associate Professor at UM-Flint and lead faculty member of the IPE foundational programs at U-M. “Their commitment and passion for advancing IPE is immeasurable and our best is yet to come.”

The rest of the award-winning team, representing U-M health science schools and centers that are integral to the IPE initiative:  Melissa Gross (Kinesiology), Olivia Anderson (Public Health), Karen Farris (Pharmacy), Mark Fitzgerald (Dentistry), Debbie Mattison (Social Work), Laurel Moore (Medicine), Peggy Ursuy (Nursing), Tazin Daniels (Center for Research on Teaching and Learning), Ghaidaa Najjar and Vani Patterson (Michigan Center for IPE). MIPERC criteria for its Demonstration Model Award includes: “The team must be actively contributing towards the mission of Interprofessional education and demonstrate leadership qualities that promote the importance of interprofessional collaborative practice concepts to both/either/or students and peers.” 

The Midwest Interprofessional Practice, Education, and Research Center (MIPERC) multi-institution coalition is dedicated to incorporating interprofessional health practice with education. MIPERC bestows awards annually for best practices in “collaborative, innovative, and interprofessional initiatives across disciplines, learning institutions, and health care systems.” The awards were presented in September at the 2019 MIPERC conference in Grand Rapids, MI.  U-M faculty and staff presented at the 2019 MIPERC conference on the foundational experience and other IPE topics.

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