LINC Poised for Impact through Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice Publications
Two LINC publications appeared in the same issue of the Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice this fall, the official journal of the National Academies of Practice—positioning LINC for impact within the field of interprofessional education (IPE).
Recto P, Lesser J, Farokhi MR, Lacy CJ, Chapa I, Garcia S, Johnson L, Geelhoed M, Stone M, Worabo H, Zorek JA*. Addressing health inequities through co-curricular interprofessional education: a secondary analysis scoping review. J Interprof Educ Pract. 2022;29:100549.
The first publication grew out of a years-long collaboration within the LINC Co-Curricular IPE Initiative. This group, led by Dr. Moshtagh Farokhi, Professor/Clinical and School of Dentistry representative to the LINC Faculty Council, initiated a scoping review to identify and classify examples of IPE that take place outside of formal curricula to augment students’ learning and/or professional development.
According to Farokhi, “One of the most interesting findings from our scoping review was the high prevalence of co-curricular IPE being utilized to address unmet needs of oftentimes marginalized, underserved groups within local communities. This certainly resonated with my experience advocating for co-curricular IPE at UT Health San Antonio over the last decade of my career.”
Dr. Pamela Recto, Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and member of the LINC Co-Curricular IPE Initiative who also serves as Assistant Director of UT Health San Antonio’s South Texas Area Health Education Center (ST-AHEC), agrees with Farokhi. To explore the issue further, Recto and members of the LINC Co-Curricular IPE Initiative conducted a secondary analysis of the aforementioned scoping review in the hopes of describing co-curricular IPE activities intended to address health inequities more specifically. The result, published in September, highlights exemplars that can further inform efforts in IPE to address this challenge. “One of our primary recommendations was for more health equity-related content to be integrated into IPE competency framework published by IPEC, the Interprofessional Education Collaborative,” said Recto.
Zorek JA*, Ragucci KR, Eickhoff J, Najjar G, Ballard J, Blue A, Bronstein L, Dow A, Gunaldo T, Hageman H, Karpa K, Michalec B, Nickol D, Odiaga J, Ohtake P, Pfeifle A, Southerland J, Vlasses F, Young V, Zomorodi M. Development and validation of the IPEC Institutional Assessment Instrument. J Interprof Educ Pract. 2022;29:100553.
Dr. Joseph Zorek, LINC Director and Associate Professor in the School of Nursing, co-led a Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation-funded project from 2020-2022 in partnership with IPEC to develop and validate the IPEC Institutional Assessment Instrument. This tool, rooted in the IPEC competency framework and designed to measure institutional capacity for high-quality programmatic IPE, addresses a critical deficiency within the field of IPE.
“Thanks to the tireless efforts of our nationally representative expert panel, advisory panel, and project consultants, administrative leaders at universities throughout the country now have an evidence-based tool to better understand the barriers and facilitators to IPE at their local institutions,” said Zorek.