Expanding Undergraduate Health Professions & Medical Student Experiences in IPE

Saint Louis University (SLU) has had a major commitment to interprofessional education for several years and was one of the first programs in the country to offer a comprehensive curriculum in interprofessional education (IPE) that is distinctive in many ways. In addition to required and elective courses involving medical students, SLU has an extensive IPE curriculum involving baccalaureate-entry, undergraduate students in several health professions.

The undergraduates can already take a 4-course concentration in IPE, and now SLU proposes to enhance this concentration, particularly by expanding the existing collaborative experiences for undergraduates that involve interprofessional teams working in community settings around subjects such as population health, an example of which would be projects that have been done in a jail.  SLU also proposes developing three new undergraduate IPE courses and experiences in order to offer a 7-course undergraduate minor in IPE.  Interestingly, since SLU’s administration allocates funding to programs in relation to undergraduate student enrollment, the work begun in a Macy Foundation grant should, if successful in attracting student interest, be sustained over a long time.  The new courses for the IPE minor are innovative, and the grant funding would specifically allow developing a new course to train students in research methods and outcomes related to interprofessional collaborative practice.  In addition, the grant funding would enable SLU to enhance its IPE programs involving medical students by developing new teamwork experiences in both simulated and real clinical settings, for example by expanding a long-standing medical student-run health clinic into an interprofessional clinic.