A Case For Interprofessional Exchange In Family Medicine

This is a repost from today’s Primary Care Progress. HealthCetera and Primary Care Progress are modeling that interprofessional exchange matters to advance the public’s health.  We’re celebrating Nurses Week together. 

The IOM’s 2010 report The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health called for “nurses [to] be full partners, with physicians and other health care professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States.”  We need a culture of collaboration and interprofessionalism in education and practice. Here, an R.N. makes the case for interprofessionalism in family medicine in this post that originally ran in 2012 on STFM’s blog.

By Courtney Kasun, R.N., M.N.Sc.

One year ago, I began teaching in an interprofessional student clinic.  The student clinic itself had been around for decades, staffed by students in our family medicine clerkship.  However, after a recent campus-wide push for more interprofessional education across health care disciplines, we began adding nursing and pharmacy students to our clinic and having all the students see patients as an interprofessional team.