Promoting Quality Improvement in Primary Care Through a Longitudinal, Project-Based, Interprofessional Curriculum.

Introduction: Health professionals must demonstrate competencies in quality improvement (QI) and interprofessional (IP) practice. Yet few curricula are designed to address these competencies in an integrated, longitudinal way. Our experiential IP QI curriculum addresses this gap.

Promoting Role Clarity for Health Professional Students Participating in an Interprofessional Behavior Change Counseling Workshop.

Interprofessional role clarity is linked to improving team collaboration and clinical care, yet there are barriers to implementing interprofessional curricula targeted to learner achievement of this competency. A behavior change counseling skills workshop for first-year advanced practice nursing (APN) (n=153) and third-year pharmacy (PharmD) (n=127) students was modified to include learning experiences for enhancing interprofessional role clarity. Students rated the importance of each profession's contributions in nine patient care activities before and after the workshop.

Veteran Affairs Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education: transforming nurse practitioner education.

To integrate health care professional learners into patient-centered primary care delivery models, the Department of Veterans Affairs has funded five Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPCEs). The main goal of the CoEPCEs is to develop and test innovative structural and curricular models that foster transformation of health care training from profession-specific "silos" to interprofessional, team-based educational and care delivery models in patient-centered primary care settings. CoEPCE implementation emphasizes four core curricular domains: shared decision making, sustained relationships, interprofessional collaboration, and performance improvement.

Meeting a primary care challenge in the United States: chronic illness care.

Leading health care experts in the United States have stated that the greatest primary care challenge today is meeting the complex needs of patients with chronic illness/long-term conditions or impairment.To address this challenge, there is a need for health care system redesign that requires a multidisciplinary team approach, including active participation from professional nurses. In particular, it is essential for advanced practice nurses to provide leadership in health systems design for which they are specifically trained and experienced.