For Belle Aduaka, a Health Management and Policy MPH Candidate at the University of Michigan, interest in interprofessional practice and education, or IPE, is personal. Her mother’s experience navigating the healthcare system while living with lupus showed Belle firsthand the challenges patients can face when care is spread across multiple specialists. When she learned about interprofessional practice and education, she immediately saw its potential to help create more coordinated, patient-centered care.
This summer, Belle brought that perspective to her internship with the Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (CIPE), where she worked directly with healthcare teams at Michigan Medicine to evaluate teamwork and develop interventions to strengthen collaboration. As she reflects on her experience, she shares what first drew her to IPE, what surprised her about interprofessional practice, and the lessons she’ll carry into her career.
What initially interested you about IPE?
My mom has lupus, which is an autoimmune disease, and her experiences navigating our complex health system have been a huge inspiration for my career. With a chronic disease like lupus, she needs various healthcare specialists to tackle every aspect of her health, but the difficulty is that they don’t always communicate with each other. When I learned about interprofessional practice and education, I was in awe. I thought, “This is what’s missing from our health systems. This is how we can get towards truly coordinated care.” Drawing that connection created a spark for all my work this summer, and I know I’ll carry that spark throughout my career.
What surprised you the most about getting this close-up view of interprofessional practice?
What surprised me most was how comfortable people felt within their role groups (i.e., nurses with nurses and physicians with physicians), but communication was less comfortable across those role groups. It really reinforced why it’s so important to have health science students learn how to work together and communicate across disciplines prior to entering the workforce. I feel so much pride that our institution views this as a priority and that the CIPE is situated to bridge the gap between learners and healthcare professionals.
How did your perspective as a public health student shape your work this summer?
Being a public health student, I often think about issues from a population perspective. While medical care is focused on the individual, it also has the opportunity to improve community health. Working with teams in the hospital, I constantly thought about how the interventions we were developing equipped team members to provide high-quality care to patients and how that, in turn, improved patients’ quality of life once they left the hospital. I also always kept in mind that interventions couldn’t be “one size fits all.” Team members have a variety of ways in which they approach teamwork, so it is important to ensure that interventions are developed with every team member in mind to create space for them to participate in an equitable way.
What are some key takeaways from your internship?
I truly believe that interprofessional practice can revolutionize healthcare. A patient’s health must be viewed as a whole, not in parts. Thus, healthcare cannot continue to be siloed if we want to deliver high-quality care. It is imperative that interprofessional teams are equipped with tools and systems that facilitate collaboration for the benefit of the patient, and I believe that can only be achieved through the kind of work that is being done at CIPE.
There’s more than one way to be a health administrator. Before this internship, I falsely assumed health administrators were typically far removed from patients and even medical personnel, but working with CIPE quickly changed my perspective. I had the opportunity to make connections with hospital team members, directly see the impact I was making in unit culture, and even observe patient interactions during a shift change. This internship really opened my eyes to potential career paths I didn’t know existed prior to starting my graduate program.
What's Next
As Belle looks ahead to the next chapter of her career, she’ll take with her a deeper understanding of what it means to build a healthcare system where collaboration is part of the culture. Her summer with CIPE reinforced her belief that better teamwork can lead to better care, and gave her a firsthand look at how she can contribute to that work as a future health administrator.