Assessing Interprofessional Interactions of Primary Care Practitioner Trainees

The patient-centered medical home model is transforming the delivery of outpatient care, with improved quality of care, better patient experiences, and enhanced processes of care. However, teams of interprofessional health care workers have diverse viewpoints that occasionally present instances of miscommunication. In addition, few materials exist that provide potential assessments for graduate-level interprofessional trainees. We constructed an interprofessional objective structured clinical examination (IPOSCE) to assess patient-centered behaviors of nurse practitioner residents and third-year internal medicine residents.

This IPOSCE comprises two phases. First, learners interact with a standardized patient with complex medical and psychosocial issues. Next, they engage in a series of stations with standardized interprofessional colleagues, each of whom is trained to deliver a non-patient-centered challenging line during their interaction.

Trainees felt that the cases reasonably reflected their typical outpatient practices but had some concerns about logistics and thought the cases may have presented heightened communication challenges compared with typical practice.

In sum, this IPOSCE workplace simulation successfully assessed communication skills of our resident trainees with standardized patients and standardized instructors in a realistic setting.