Student perceptions of an interprofessional educational experience: The importance of goal articulation

The education of future health care professionals must involve activities where interprofessional collaboration and the functioning of interdisciplinary teams are the goals and not the exceptions. This type of interprofessional education (IPE) will benefit students as they will be better able to communicate with and mobilize the skills of other health care workers, work toward common goals related to patient care, and develop a more cost-effective treatment strategy in the long term. Such an IPE program was initiated in the clinical anatomy course for physician assistant students from the University of Mount Union that was taught, in part, by medical students from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. Surveys of both student groups at the end of the course indicated that although this was a useful IPE experience, the value of this program as an IPE experience was not entirely appreciated by the participating students. It turned out that although the goals and importance of these types of IPE activities are clear to the faculty, they must also be made clear to all of the students.