No Place Like Home: The Impact on Medical Students of an Interprofessional Home Visit Experience with Pharmacy Students

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Medical and pharmacy schools are required to train learners using interprofessional education (IPE) to meet accrediting requirements and to enhance the learning experience. Standards for optimal IPE learning have not yet been clearly identified. During a year-long course, 135 third-year medical students participated in a clinical home visit experience with third-year pharmacy students and a geriatrician or geriatric nurse practitioner. Six weeks after the home visits, medical students completed a survey about the value of the experience. In addition, at both the beginning and end of the third-year course, medical students completed a survey of attitudes about physicians and other health care providers, including pharmacists. Interdisciplinary work was significantly less valuable than the other aspects of the home visit (p < 0.001). The top three learning elements were: (1) close contact with the patient, (2) experience of the practitioner, and (3) debriefing after the visit. IPE is an important avenue to enhance education at all levels and in multiple areas of medical education. However, consideration of the learning environment is imperative to success of any IPE experience. This study is one of the first to demonstrate that the setting of the experience is at least as important and may be more important than length of interaction, types of faculty involved, level of learners, and preparation for all parties in the design of an IPE experience.