UConn held its second annual Interprofessional Education Dean’s Afternoon Sept. 30, part of its continuing educational mission to emphasize the importance of collaboration among health care providers.

The idea behind interprofessional education is to engage students from all health professions and better position them to work together in the future.

“We are noticing more frequently that physicians, pharmacists, nurses, social workers, physical therapists, and others are working collaboratively to provide patient care,” says UConn M.D./MPH candidate Fludiona Naka. “We are moving away from the outmoded structures that used to be predominant because we have recognized that in order to provide the best care to the patient we need to work together. This is what some call a team-approach or a term that I like even better, a patient-centered approach.”

The dean’s afternoon drew approximately 450 students and 40 faculty and staff to concurrent events in Storrs and Farmington, and included the schools of Medicine, Dental Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Social Work, and Dietetics.

“Our students will be entering a very different world as they start practice in 5-10 years,” says Dr. Bruce Gould, associate dean for primary care in the UConn School of Medicine. “We will have transformed our fee-for-service, physician-centric model to one of interprofessional team-based practice caring for populations of patients. Dean’s Afternoon and our other interprofessional curricula and programs are training our students for the future reality they will face.”

Learning objectives included:

• Identifying the interdependence between health professions’ education
• Competency development for collaborative practice and practice needs
• Identifying the educational pathways and scope of practice for health professions
• How to engage students in the process of interprofessional collaboration

“Learning about interprofessional collaboration beginning at the outset of their professional education is crucial for students because we learn to appreciate and value other professions and what they have to offer,” Naka says. “I firmly believe that interprofessional education will transform health education and thus lead to transformation of health care delivery.”