Interprofessional Education Student Event

The School of Health Professions and Nursing will hold its first annual Interprofessional Education (IPE) Student Event on April 18 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the Hillwood Lecture Hall. Students and faculty members will work together to understand the goals and responsibilities of a health care team.

The event will include 350 students and 35 faculty members from 10 of the department’s programs. The students will be divided into teams of 10, with each team receiving one faculty facilitator. Each team will be given a case study of a hypothetical situation that a health care team might have to deal with, and the team will have to coordinate, identify the conflicts, and learn what each person’s role in the case would be. “The purpose of the event is for students who are enrolled in health profession programs and other programs to work together as a team in the academic setting,” Dean of Health Professions and Nursing Stacy Gropack said. “So that when they go out and work in their actual practice setting as practice professionals, they’ve already had that experience.”

Gropack said students at the event will also learn about professions and disciplines they aren’t pursuing. “This event is designed to allow students who never met each other to work together in a team,” Gropack said. “So a nursing student will learn what a social worker does and what a nutritionist does so they can understand better how they can work together for the best of the patient,” she explained.

Each case study was written by the faculty of all of the different programs for a more diverse experience. Laura Prager was on the planning committee as the Nursing Department’s representative. “It was necessary for us to compose an interprofessional team of faculty experts on the planning committee that represent the various majors the students are studying here at LIU Post,” she said.

Students no longer can join at this time, but Gropack said they will extend this to other students in the future. The School of Health Professions and Nursing also plan to make this an annual event and do more events like this in the future. “This is a new initiative for LIU Post,” she explained. “The reason we’re doing this is because this is how the health care system works.”

Gropack said that between getting the faculty on board, training the faculty to be facilitators, creating the case studies, and organizing the students into groups, the planning for this event took over a year. “The IPE Planning Committee met multiple times to work through the logistics of the event to provide the students with a valuable and meaningful experience,” Prager said.

For more information about this event and future IPE events, contact Gropack directly at stacy. gropack@liu.edu or at 516-299-2486.