The Center for Interprofessional Education hosted international experts from the Centre for Advancing Collaborative Healthcare & Education for a workshop focused on successful teamwork.
We know that our educators all want the best for their students. This includes offering the best models of care when learning about interprofessional education (IPE). But sometimes even the best models are in need of an upgrade from time to time.
The Center for Interprofessional Education (C-IPE) recognized that in order to help educators effectively teach students, they would first need to improve the ways that educators work together in the places where students truly learn teamwork.
In order to accomplish this, C-IPE recruited a team of facilitators from the Centre for Advancing Collaborative Healthcare & Education (CACHE) at the University of Toronto, a group with a strong reputation in the IPE space. C-IPE stakeholders with key roles in educator development and experiential education participated in the virtual BOOST! workshop, or Building Optimal Outcomes from Successful Teamwork.
The BOOST! workshop focused on how to optimize teamwork in the clinical space and had three primary learning objectives:
- Apply interprofessional competency-based tools to optimize communication, conflict and performance for virtual and non-virtual teams
- Promote a climate of psychological safety and team functioning in virtual and non-virtual interactions and meetings
- Reflect on and develop an action plan for improving quality, safe team-based care in your context
Throughout the three hour learning session, participants listened to presenters, broke out into working groups for discussion and watched a series of videos that modeled teamwork (or in some cases, lack of teamwork) in action. Concepts such as psychological safety, which is the belief that members of a team have trust and feel safe to take risks without the fear of embarrassment or punishment, were discussed at length. The group explored the power of language, communication and conflict styles, and how they contributed toward team function.
Those in attendance found the session highly valuable.
“We were inspired by the enthusiasm and overall engagement of the participants,” said Vani Patterson, administrative director of the C-IPE. “The insights gained from this session will be extremely useful as we begin preparing our own suite of offerings in support of team-based care for our faculty and staff.”
Members of the C-IPE educator development working group will take the information gained from this workshop and use it to create a series of mini modules that can be used within the U-M community to improve practice, teamwork and create a culture of psychological safety among team members. This will allow our educators to better serve students on their interprofessional education journey.