Inter-Professional Realities

By Daniel P. Smith

College of Pharmacy committed to growing interprofessional education that prepares students for team-based practice and addresses societal needs

Though a mounting collection of evidence supports the usefulness of interprofessional training for effective healthcare delivery and even as the healthcare practice world increasingly embraces team-based care, traditional health-professions education continues to take place in silos. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other health professionals-in-training have limited opportunity to learn and practice in interprofessional teams during their formative years, a reality that subsequently hampers their ability to maximize collaborative interactions and enhance patient care as working professionals.

This, Dr. Mike Koronkowski assures, will not be the case at the UIC College of Pharmacy.

Bolstered by deep-rooted relationships between the College of Pharmacy and its fellow UIC health-science colleges, as well as a diverse array of community partners, Koronkowski is supercharging collaborative, team-based education as the college’s first-ever director of interprofessional education. Broadening curriculum options and expanding experiential opportunities through community partnerships and collaborations, Koronkowski says UIC pharmacy students will be armed with relevant, interprofessional training that advances patient-centered care, addresses disparities, and cements the college’s commitment to tackling urgent public health concerns.

“With purpose and an outcomes-based approach, we’re going to become a leader in interprofessional education,” says Koronkowski, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice.

An intensifying priority

UIC College of Pharmacy dean Glen Schumock calls interprofessional education a key priority for the college and the precise reason why the college invested in Koronkowski’s position in 2020. Simply put: modernday pharmacists need to understand how to work alongside their healthcare colleagues to pursue optimal health outcomes.

“All members of the healthcare team must be aware of the value others bring to inform care,” Schumock says. “By providing this interprofessional training to our students early on and preparing them for these interactions, they will be better prepared to move forward in the practice world,” Schumock says.

Other key factors are at play as well, including accreditation. Health-science education standards increasingly expect team-based care as a standard of practice. Beyond that, there stand frameworks from the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Sciences as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy People 2030 initiative designed to promote, strengthen, and evaluate the nation’s efforts to improve the health and well-being of all people and communities. Through community partnerships, targeted interventions, and a shared vision, Koronkowski says coordinated and vibrant healthcare collaboration can help reduce health disparities, achieve health equity, and bolster health literacy.

“The significant and pressing public health problems we face in this world are not solved by any one discipline alone,” Koronkowski says. “It takes a collaborative effort to meet this need and that’s why interprofessional education is so important.”

With a total of seven health-science colleges, as well as deep community partnerships with public health agencies, health systems, nonprofits, and others, UIC is uniquely positioned to address societal needs while arming its students in pharmacy and the affiliated health sciences with the skills and knowledge to succeed in interdisciplinary, team-based practice environments.

“The opportunity to contribute in this space at UIC is tremendous, both in the classroom and in the field,” Koronkowski says.

Interprofessional in the classroom

To be certain, the College of Pharmacy had been growing its portfolio of interprofessional learning opportunities over recent years, eager to place its students alongside peers from medicine, public health, nursing, and other health disciplines to generate rich learning opportunities.

Three years ago, faculty from UIC’s Interprofessional Collaborative Practice Workgroup teamed up to launch a pilot course on interprofessional collaboration. That course, Foundations of Interprofessional Collaborative Practice, has since evolved to include all seven healthscience colleges at UIC and is now a required course for all first-year pharmacy students.

“This helps all students understand how they’re going to work together and communicate as a team, while also positioning them to begin defining their own professional identity,” says Dr. Kristen Goliak, PharmD ’98, a clinical associate professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice and the college’s associate dean for academic affairs.

In the one-semester course, students initially explore the roles and responsibilities of each discipline as well as effective strategies for teamwork and collaboration. Students are later placed into interdisciplinary groups of 10–20 individuals and tasked to review a case study in chronic pain management through discussions, exercises, and reflection activities with a faculty facilitator.

Goliak, who guides the course alongside other UIC health-science faculty, says the foundational course holds strong value for pharmacy students. In particular, it spotlights the key role pharmacists play on interdisciplinary healthcare teams.

“Pharmacists are so much more a part of the team than they were 30 years ago, and this course sets the stage for all students to understand that and carry that knowledge forward with them,” Goliak says.

Building on that foundational course, Dr. Kevin Rynn, vice dean of the College of Pharmacy’s Rockford campus, has spearheaded the movement toward interprofessional courses offering tabletop, simulatedpatient, and mannequin-based exercises designed to drive home clinical content alongside interprofessional education collaborative (IPEC) competencies that encourage students from multiple professions to “learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes.”

“Simply having a lecture together is not enough, and that’s why we’re continually working to develop opportunities for students from multiple disciplines to work together regularly in these more interactive settings,” Rynn says. “This will help them recognize the talents and skills others possess and learn when and how to rely on their other healthcare colleagues.”

The classroom in the community

The College of Pharmacy has also worked to inject interprofessional education into experiential learning, providing students hands-on training to prepare them for the realities of professional practice.

Six years ago, for instance, Koronkowski led the launch of Engage-IL, an interprofessional education and practice initiative focused on seniors. Pharmacy students work alongside peers from other UIC healthscience colleges to develop education and training

materials to spur improved patient and family-centered care for older adults. The Engage-IL experience not only grounds students in interprofessional collaboration and work with community partners, but also propels the efforts of those working with a high-risk population.

“Collaborating with UIC, we’re able to benefit older adults while also imparting valuable knowledge and information to those coming up in allied health professions,” says Elizabeth Cagan, the executive director of Chicago-based White Crane Wellness Center, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the health and well-being of older adults through a variety of evidence-based programs and services. “It’s a true win-win relationship.”

Koronkowski, alongside fellow Department of Pharmacy Practice faculty member Dr. Jennie Jarrett, also oversees Interprofessional Approaches to Health Disparities (IAHD). The longitudinal course equips learners from UIC health-science colleges with essential skills to improve healthcare for underserved populations and to transform health disparities through interprofessional education, research, and practice.

During the two-semester course, an interdisciplinary team of students attach themselves to a community partner working with a marginalized population— the homeless, HIV patients, immigrant refugees, or the incarcerated, for example. Students conduct a community needs assessment before developing a tangible work product to address a notable gap in care. One IAHD project, for instance, educated case managers in a homeless shelter about the safe use of naloxone in the event of an opioid overdose. Amid COVID-19, many teams pivoted to developing telehealth projects to provide ongoing care in different at-risk populations.

“This brings the classroom to the community,” Koronkowski says. “Students learn to work better as a team and respect the scope and role of others. The hope is that some go into practice in these areas and become leaders where these pressing needs exist.”

Applying interprofessional education in a real-world setting also remains a hallmark of the longstanding Rural Health Program at UIC’s Rockford campus in which pharmacy, nursing, and medical students learn side-by-side about the provision of care in rural populations. It includes a capstone project in which teams of students develop and execute an activity targeting health needs in a specific rural community.

“This prepares our students to be in tune with other healthcare partners so they can tap into different resources and drive patient care, which is incredibly important in rural settings,” Rynn says, noting that 60 percent of Rural Pharmacy Program graduates later practice in rural areas. “We’re preparing them for the roles they’re going to fill.”

According to Koronkowski, pharmacy students have been increasingly drawn to such experiential, interprofessional opportunities because of their collaborative, entrepreneurial bent that engenders real-world impact.

“This helps students see that wherever pharmacists go they can be collaborators and changemakers who create effective, sustainable programs that help people,” he says.

A commitment to interprofessional education

Recognizing that new models of healthcare delivery require careful integration with innovative models of health-professions education, Koronkowski stands committed to advancing the College of Pharmacy’s work in interprofessional education. He promises innovative, team-based study that helps pharmacy students discover the breadth and scope of other professions as well as

collaboration with community partners that enrich the learning experience and address gaps in care.

“We don’t need to work in silos,” Koronkowski says. “Understanding what our healthcare colleagues can do is insightful and powerful and fosters improved outcomes.”

An essential cross-campus pharmacy interprofessional working group was established and charged to lead innovations, broaden curricular and experiential opportunities for students, strengthen alignment with IPEC competencies, and produce evidence-based work that demonstrates the critical importance and value of interprofessional education. In addition to Koronkowski, Rynn, Goliak, and Jarrett, that working group includes College of Pharmacy team members Drs. Marlowe Djuric Kachlic, Marianne Pop, Rosalyn Vellurattil, and Benjamin Shultz as well as Megan Magnuson and Mary Sullivan Kopale.

“We have a bedrock of work we are establishing here at the College of Pharmacy and are going to continue leveraging that in a thoughtful, strategic way with our partners so our students have unparalleled experiences and UIC emerges as a leader in interprofessional education and team-based practice,” Koronkowski says.