Working Together: Evaluating Interprofessional Experiences on a Pediatric Clerkship

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Background:Medical schools offer interprofessional education (IPE) opportunities during preclinical years; however, the literature holds fewer descriptions of projects designed to promote IPE for medical students in clinical settings. Our project seeks to evaluate if students on a 6-week pediatric clerkship can establish working relationships with other health care providers (HCP). Methods: We instructed 167 pediatric clerkship students to interact with two different non-physician HCPs and then to ask the providers to complete comments-only evaluations of the student's professionalism. Encounters were to occur as part of normal patient care interactions. A dataset was created to record time-of-year, setting (wards, nursery, emergency department, clinic/offices), evaluator's profession and status (trainee or staff/faculty), and student's career interests. Descriptive statistics were generated for this cross-sectional study. Results: 304 evaluations were submitted, demonstrating a 91% completion rate at an average of 1.8 evaluations per student (range 1-2). Pharmacists completed the most evaluations (46%, n= 140), which were all completed on general wards where pharmacists are well-integrated into clinical teams on which students rotate. Nurses completed the next highest amount (29%, n=87). Conclusion: Clerkship students are able to establish working relationships with other HCPs in clinical settings. However, clerkship directors may have to guide students to reach out more broadly to providers outside structured teams.