Bridging silos and building impact in BC’s health system
More than 130 people from diverse perspectives across British Columbia...
The objectives related to collaborative health education, as articulated in the new UBC Health strategic plan, Better Health Together, build on years of work in interprofessional education. UBC Health will continue to integrate interprofessional and collaborative health education to shape the workforce of tomorrow and inform the systems that promote the health of individuals, communities, and society.
We continue to work with health programs to advance collaborative practice through new approaches to education that focus on areas that are crucial to practitioner and system development.
Over the next five years, UBC Health will work to advance three strategic objectives related to collaborative health education.
Education innovation
We will renew classroom-based learning, such as the UBC Health Integrated Curriculum, collaborate in the development of practice-based opportunities, and leverage innovations in practice to align collaborative health education.
Our team is constantly working to improve and expand the Integrated Curriculum to ensure students from different disciplines engage in meaningful learning with each other and become effective collaborators.
The well-established Integrated Curriculum offers interprofessional learning to 14 health programs and is delivered to more than 2,000 students each fall. It covers topics that are relevant and important to all professions, including Indigenous cultural safety, which is facilitated through a partnership with the Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Health.
“Our team is constantly working to improve and expand the Integrated Curriculum to ensure students from different disciplines engage in meaningful learning with each other and become effective collaborators,” says Caroline Voisine, Curriculum Manager at UBC Health. “Based on ongoing evaluations, we are refining the objectives and content of the Integrated Curriculum to ensure we provide students with interprofessional learning experiences that prepare them for practice.”
Expanded placements
We will help health and health-related programs develop models that build placement capacity and promote collaborative placements across British Columbia.
UBC Health has been working with health programs at UBC and partners in northern BC on the creation of the Rural Education Access Coordination Hub (REACH) to increase the number of health professional students who complete placements in rural and remote areas of the province. REACH will be a sustainable and responsive network of healthcare providers, hospitals, health authorities, community organizations, and educational institutions. It will connect students with high quality rural and remote placements as well as train and support preceptors to provide strong mentorship to students. Once the framework has been developed and evaluated, REACH will be a scalable model for inter-institutional coordination of work-integrated learning in rural and remote areas across BC and will be shared widely with other communities.
...supporting a positive learning experience using a collaborative and connected partnership approach across sectors and at the local level will have a positive impact...
“Exposure to rural environments during undergraduate health profession training affects recruitment and retention in non-urban settings,” says Carrie Krekoski, Practice Education Manager at UBC Health. “Facilitating this exposure and supporting a positive learning experience—using a collaborative and connected partnership approach across sectors and at the local level—will have a positive impact within the broader strategy for overcoming the shortage of rural healthcare practitioners.”
Education ecosystem in team-based care
We will support clinical innovations and collaborations that will inform models for team-based education.
We have been working with colleagues and community to help launch a team-based care clinic in the proposed Gateway Building on the Vancouver campus. We are also supporting efforts to create a similar clinic in Kelowna. These clinics will act as sites for innovation in practice-based education.
We will network campus clinics with team-based practices across BC, which will provide a space to build innovative models of team-based care and collaborative health education.
“We will network campus clinics with team-based practices across BC, which will provide a space to build innovative models of team-based care and collaborative health education,” says Donna Drynan, Director of Education at UBC Health. “This network of clinics will provide an environment to test supports for team development and practice improvement and conduct research to identify promising team-based care practices.”
More information
- Better Health Together: UBC Health Strategic Plan 2021-2026
- Strategic plan May 12 launch video
- Strategic plan article series
Posted May 13, 2021
