When the 1999 landmark Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “To Err is Human” was published, estimating that up to 98,000 Americans die annually in hospitals due to medical errors, I was skeptical of these findings. However, subsequent estimates are actually higher, with the most recent one citing 210,000 – 440,000 medical error related deaths every year, mostly due to healthcare associated infections and medication errors.
Although there are many immediate factors that lead to these tragedies, root cause analyses indicate that 80 percent of the underlying problems are due to poor teamwork, such as ineffective communication, coordination and/or collaboration among and with health care providers from different professions as well as with patients and their loved ones.
This is not a surprise to many of us health professionals. After all, as the IOM points out, health professionals are educated and trained separately, and then, after graduation, are expected to work together as a team. It is as if every baseball player were trained only with players from the same position (first basemen, outfielders, etc.), and after training are expected to suddenly play together as a team.
The IOM has said that one of the long term solutions to addressing medical errors is interprofessional education (IPE), which is the education and training of students from different health professions together, including the teaching of effective team strategies.
While bringing together different health professions programs for collaborative and joint education is challenging, University of New England (UNE), with our 13 health professional degree programs, is on the forefront of IPE.
UNE health professions students, including those from medicine, pharmacy, dental, nursing, dental hygiene, physician assistant, social work, occupational therapy and physical therapy, are educated together on our campuses to become effective members of interprofessional health care teams.
Recently we have started working with clinical settings to also train our students there in teams. These efforts were recently recognized by a prestigious Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation grant to expand these interprofessional team student clinical trainings in rural Maine, starting with Aroostook County (the County). We are launching this effort on April 14 with an Interprofessional Collaborative Practice Summit in Presque Isle for interested health care professionals, in collaboration with UNE’s Maine Area Health Education Center (AHEC) and the Northern Maine Community College.
We anticipate that students from UNE’s health professions programs will be working in these teams in the County by this fall. We are excited about the welcoming we have received from the County’s community health centers and hospitals, and we look forward to more of our students experiencing rural Maine, while learning how to work in effective teams to assure patient safety. It is our hope that many students will return to work in the County after their training is complete.
As a health and sciences university grounded in the liberal arts and as the largest educator of physicians and other health professionals in Maine, UNE is a private university with a public mission: to use multiple and innovative approaches in collaboration with our clinical partners to address health and health care issues across Maine.
Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, Vice President for Clinical Affairs, UNE
