Utilization of Postgraduate Pharmacy Residents and Fellows as Facilitators in Interprofessional Education

To provide quality interprofessional education (IPE), active learning sessions must involve facilitators who can articulate values and ethics, communicate effectively, and honor roles and responsibilities. Facilitators are commonly faculty, staff, or clinicians. However, with competing interests, faculty, staff, and clinician time can be limited and a barrier to implementing effective IPE. The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy implemented a system to utilize residents and fellows as IPE facilitators to combat this challenge and provide additional teaching opportunities to trainees completing a teaching certificate. To ensure a quality educational experience for the students, it’s essential to know if pharmacy trainees have the appropriate interprofessional facilitation skills to provide valuable knowledge to students in the curriculum. In addition, there also needs to be a method to hear the perspectives of pharmacy trainees and understand their perceptions of the benefits, or lack of, of being an IPE facilitator as a part of their training program requirements.

We designed a quality improvement initiative to assess pharmacy trainees' skills to facilitate IPE using the Interprofessional Facilitation Scale (IPFS), understand areas of success and needs improvement, and explore trainees' perspectives on the value of being a facilitator in the IPE curriculum. The survey contained 20 questions, 18 of which were from the IPFS, designed to evaluate factors critical to facilitating successful IPE, and two de-novo questions intended to generate discussions on the career benefits from IPE and previous experience with IPE. This quality improvement initiative was designed to serve as a method of continuous quality improvement while also building the evidence base for trainees' role in IPE Facilitation.

After completing their facilitation assignments, trainees perceived they were good or excellent at IPF skills. Areas of success were the quality of the facilitator training before their first session, the ability to co-facilitate with faculty members in different professions, and continuing to advance their understanding of other professions’ roles.

Overall, pharmacy residents and fellows, as trainees, are capable facilitators. Trainees' perception of IPE is positive, offering a unique teaching experience for those interested in facilitation. Our data supports the utilization of trainees as IPE facilitators alongside faculty and staff. This professional poster will describe outcomes from the quality improvement project and the process for recruiting and training advanced trainees to serve as IPE Facilitators that may be useful to other institutions that would like to explore utilizing advanced health professional trainees to meet their interprofessional facilitation needs.