A Decade of Interactive Educational Exchange: Impacting Interprofessional Palliative Care Education

Key Message: This work describes the andragogical infrastructure, program development, educational impact, and critical lessons for the Interactive Educational Exchange, an interprofessional innovation at the Annual Assembly of Hospice and Palliative Care for over a decade. Rapid dissemination of hospice and palliative care educational scholarship, collaborative mentorship, and community building were prioritized.

Abstract:

Background: The interprofessional clinical practice model is arguably the most impactful and generative aspect of hospice and palliative care (HPC) clinical practice. In response to a deficit in interprofessional HPC educational opportunities for rapid scholarship dissemination, interprofessional leaders from medicine, social work and nursing proposed and implemented the Interactive Education Exchange (IEE) at the Annual Assembly of Hospice and Palliative Care presented by AAHPM and HPNA from 2010-2020. This abstract describes the shared interprofessional leadership model, andragogical infrastructure, educational impact, and critical lessons from the IEE.

Methods: The IEE was an interactive, hands-on session for interprofessional HPC educators to showcase innovations using a structured format with a focus on trainee competencies for each professional discipline. The larger goal was to cultivate an interprofessional community of educators to promote scholarship and more rapid dissemination of educational innovations.

Results: During the 11 years of the IEE, 392 educational innovations were submitted for peer review, and 62 educational innovations were presented by 189 interprofessional authors. The majority of the 189 authors were physicians (62%, N=116). Nurses, those with doctoral degrees (PhD and EdD), social workers, and pharmacy were the next most represented at 14% (N=27), 7% (N=13), 6% (N=12), and 5% (N=9) respectively. Over the 10 years of onsite IEEs, session evaluations were consistently high, ranging from 4.36-4.68 (Likert scale 1-5) over 10 years (mean=4.59, SD 0.1).

Discussion: The reported outcome measures for interprofessional scholarship and engagement, session evaluations, and attendance demonstrate why this successful innovation was repeated annually for over a decade pre-COVID. Scholarship dissemination was rapid, with robust community engagement, inclusive of multiple professional disciplines over time. We highlight lessons around vision, structure, and community, demonstrating an IEE model that can be flexibly adapted to other settings while intentionally supporting interprofessional HPC educators in dissemination of scholarship, mentorship, and community building.

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