Symposia

Realigning the Health Care Training System for Coordinated Patient- Centered Care

Moderator:
Maggie Mahar, Ph.D., health care fellow, Century Foundation

Panelists:
Mark Kelly, M.D., Henry Ford Medical Group
Lindsey Henson, M.D., University of Minnesota
William Hersh, M.D., Oregon Health and Science University
Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN, National League of Nursing
Alyce Schultz, RN, PhD, FAAN, EBP Concepts

Today's medical education system has holes that prevent the next generation of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals from learning how to provide patient-centered care.

That was the premise of moderator Maggie Mahar, Ph.D., health care fellow, Century Foundation, as she opened the session titled "Realigning the Health Care Training System for Coordinated Patient-Centered Care."

She was joined by representatives from, nursing, medical education and medical center leadership to discuss how the core competencies identified in the Institute of Medicine's 2003 report "Bridge to Quality" might fill those gaps.

Panel discussion centered on the core competencies, most taken from the IOM report, including:

• Providing patient-centered care
• Working in interdisciplinary teams
• Using evidence-based practice
• Applying quality improvement
• Using informatics
• Shifting culture toward professionalism

The discussion sparked more than 30 recommendations to keep patients at the center of coordinated care. The top-ranked recommendations encompassed common themes of teaching future providers how to work in teams and across disciplines. The recommendations challenged educators to find ways to increase learning opportunities in real world settings.

Participants ranked these recommendations as most important:

• Introduce (early in training programs) team-based and reality-based standards and experiences that reflect all health care team members contributing at their highest level of training.
• Establish an institutional/unit commitment to patient-centered collaborative care.
• To understand patients, students should interface with the patients in their communities experiencing medical care through their patients eyes and experiences
• Incentives for students (i.e. evaluation) must be aligned with team learning.
• Health education schools need to work across disciplines to develop areas of shared curriculum to teach students team care delivery
• Create a non-punitive culture for understanding and learning from mistakes and inefficiency