Pharmacy Student Participation in an Interdisciplinary Case Conference

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 2003 by Joyner, Pamela U, Tresolini, Carol P, Harward, Donna H, Davis, W Ashley

Several facilitators offered narrative comments focused on the domination of some groups by nvirse practitioner or medical students and the confusion or complexity surrounding the use of the WHO model. However, the majority of comments expressed facilitators' enjoyment of the sessions and their satisfaction with having the opportunity to interact with students from various disciplines. One of the pharmacy facilitators remarked that, "Exchange of ideas and team concepts keeps everything working towards the goal of optimizing patient care. I found it interesting to see how each discipline's ear is tuned to something different in what they hear from patients. Everyone has valuable information to add to the care of patients."

Limitations

Faculty and administrators planning the case conference activity quickly discovered how difficult it is to identify a mutual time during the academic schedule when students from 7 disciplines can meet. Another limitation concerned the compatibility between the academic levels of the students in various disciplines. For example, the advanced-level family nurse practitioners sometimes intimidated the other students in their groups. Other students were at an intermediate level of education within their discipline. In other small groups, medical students dominated the patient interviews and discussions, most likely because of traditional perceptions of professional roles that assume physicians will exert clinical leadership. The World Health Organization's International Classification of Function and Disability" was used to give structure to the discussions within the small interdisciplinary groups. Unfortunately, some groups focused too much of their time on attempting to understand and successfully navigate the model. Only social work and allied health faculty members and students had previous experience using this fairly complex model. Finally, since so few students completed both the preconference and postconfcrence surveys, we were unable to determine withinsubject changes in knowledge and attitude and can report only aggregate data.

DISCUSSION

The inaugural year of the Interdisciplinary case Conference taught us a great deal about both the value of the activity and how the experience could be improved. Students gained knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Specifically with regard to Goal 1, students' knowledge of the training and skills of other health professionals increased overall as shown in Table 2. With respect to Goal 2, facilitators reported that students used interdisciplinary team management principles in deciding on the appropriate plan of action for the patient (Tables 4 and 5). In accordance with Goal 3, students' understanding of the value of interdisciplinary teamwork apparently increased, as shown in Table 3.

Analysis of numerical and narrative survey responses guided further development of the case conference activity. Based on what was learned, the following changes have been made to the activity:

1. The WHO model has been modified to make it less complex for facilitators who do not have previous experience in using the model. In the initial activity, only social work and allied health faculty members had previous experience with the model, and the brief, 1-hour training provided for the other facilitators on using the model was apparently insufficient. As a result, simpler conference materials have been developed to facilitate the groups' use of the model.