April is National Interprofessional Healthcare Month, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham will mark the occasion with a symposium geared at exploring ways for health care teams from different disciplines to better work together. The event is titled Interprofessional Teams: Building Bridges.
National Interprofessional Healthcare Month is sponsored by the National Academies of Practice, an umbrella organization comprising 14 different academies in the health care field. Interprofessional health care refers to a form of practice wherein health care professionals from different disciplines and professions make up a collaborative team to coordinate and deliver patient care.
The UAB symposium is Tuesday, April 30, at UAB’s School of Nursing, from 9 a.m.-3:45 p.m. The keynote speaker is Scott Newell, a commercial pilot and emergency medical technician who now works as a health care simulation educator. Newell’s presentation “The view from the cockpit: Do you see what I see?” is an overview of human factors and crew resource management for health care and simulation professionals.
Participants will also hear from Nancy McLemore, a cancer survivor and medical actress who portrays patients in simulation training for medical professionals. Lightheartedly calling herself a “hypochondriactress,” McLemore first portrayed a woman with breast cancer in training sessions with nurse practitioners. Three years later, she received her own diagnosis for breast cancer. Now cancer-free, she has experienced the vast gray area between clinical empathy and clinical detachment. Her talk will focus on her experiences with empathy, as a standardized patient in a training exercise and as a real patient.
The event is open to health care professionals at UAB and the surrounding community. Registration is available here.
“This symposium will highlight current and future interprofessional programs at UAB and in the UAB Health System,” said program organizer Peter Bosworth, with the UAB Center for Interprofessional Education and Simulation. “The program will emphasize the great strides already taken to meet the aims of interprofessional education and collaborative practice, while exploring ways to expand and improve attendees’ knowledge and understanding of the field.”