Nursing faculty bring together other health care professionals

Students from Wright State, Cedarville University, University of Dayton and Sinclair College are expected to attend an interprofessional case study competition on April 14.

The Dayton-area Interprofessional Education Consortium is in its first steps of connecting the region’s interprofessional health community with the Wright State University College of Nursing and Health.

The consortium meets every month to discuss various interprofessional topics. The group of faculty is interested in finding ways to increase this education strategy throughout the region. The goal is that interprofessional practice will lead to enhance patient outcomes.

Deb Poling, associate professor and assistant dean for graduate programs in the College of Nursing and Health, was a part of an interprofessional education consortium while she worked at Purdue. She viewed it as exceedingly beneficial, since it enabled several multidiscipline, multi-institutional healthcare programs to work together, which inspired her to initiate the same in Dayton, with Wright State taking the lead.

Wright State’s consortium consists of faculty from medicine, nursing, physical therapy, respiratory therapy, pharmacy and counseling. Poling would like to see the consortium grow to include other fields such as social work and criminology.

“I wanted a multi-institutional, multidiscipline group, and I’m really seeing this starting to form here,” she said.

Deb Poling, assistant dean for graduate programs in the College of Nursing and Health.

Since Poling hosted the first IPE consortium meeting a year ago, interest in the group has increased.

“People were asking me when we were going to meet again. I could see some real forward movement,” she said.

Consortium members will hold an interprofessional case study competition on April 14. Students are expected to attend from Wright State, Cedarville University, University of Dayton and Sinclair College.

Participants will be assigned to teams with students from multiple health care disciplines. Each group will work to create an interprofessional treatment plan for two patients in a case study. These interprofessional teams will unravel case studies they have not seen before.

The competition is one of several interprofessional education events that the consortium is planning. Poling hopes to host an IPE conference at Wright State. Her goal is that Wright State will become a pioneer in interprofessional education.