Symposia

Your Views Concerning Change — What is Required to Create the Health Care Workforce of the Future?

Event co-hosts Pat Mitchell and Dr. Cascino challenged participants to brainstorm ideas to answer the same question posed to MD Connector Competition participants:

"In order to create a health care workforce equipped to provide a high-value team approach to coordinated, patient-centered health care, what is the most important change required of the health care education system?"

The group spent an hour discussing potential changes, and submitted their consensus responses. Responses were compiled during the evening, and participants reviewed and prioritized the recommendations during the opening session on Tuesday morning.

Highest ranked recommendations included:

• Change the evaluation process to measure knowledge, skills and attitude competencies relevant to both individually provided and team-based patient care.
• Create an educational environment in which interdisciplinary students train and work together to provide excellent care to meet the needs of individual patients or groups of patients while continually seeking data on their performance regarding quality outcomes, cost and value.
• Assess and ensure the competency of individual professionals, then design team-based learning opportunities and performance-based assessments that help the team understand that their interdependence (collaboration, communication, coordination, trust, etc.) determines the patients' outcomes.
• Increase a team-based learning model in realistic environments.
• Train future physicians to understand their role in the clinical setting by learning early how to work with allied health professionals.
• Teach resource utilization as part of the basic science model, using evidence-based medicine and bioinformatics.
• Require all undergraduate, graduate and professional health care students to be exposed to meaningful, multidisciplinary high quality, patient-centered care.
• Move health care education away from an authoritative (hero-based) culture toward a collaborative culture that embraces uncertainty in a complex patient-centered environment.
• Stop paying for individual procedures and instead pay for value (better outcomes, safety & service at lower cost.)
• Define patient-centered outcomes and implement comprehensive assessment methods of those outcomes in medical school and residency programs.
• Require active participation and involvement in the community by all medical students and residents.