Why I am not a fan of Interprofessional Day

Here are the 4 stated Learning Objectives of Interprofessional Day via screen shot:

I'm all for all of these things.  I'm all for doctors and nurses and techs having better communication and helping patients get better treatment, but the real question has to come back to basic human psychology - in a work environment, how can we get people to communicate better?  

shoutout to the best
lab bench mate ever

When I look back to my last job where I was a lab manager, I know that I often chatted with one of my co-workers that was one of my good friends.  We regularly drank coffee, had lunch, went out to bars, and had a mutual respect for each other.  Naturally, this made it easy to communicate at work and ask each other questions.  

On the other hand, I had other co-workers that only talked to me when they needed a new reagent.  These were co-workers I rarely talked to, even if when I knew it would help me.

So based on n = 2 I'm going to draw a conclusions - co-workers that have a relationship, or at least have respect for each other will communicate better.  Interprofessional communication is important.  At the same time, my fear with Interprofessional Day is that it's just lip service.  If you did a controlled study across academic health centers before and after Interprofessional Days were implemented, would you actually see an improvement in communication between nurses and doctors?

My thoughts would be - no change.  Which isn't a huge problem.. except that having an Interprofessional Day allows the administration at academic health centers to claim that they're addressing the lack of interprofessional collaboration, then after that one day everyone forgets about the problem, and the status quo goes on.  Med students still think everyone else hates them for being so awesome.  Nursing students still know med students have never respected anyone.  No respect, no relationship, no communication, patients still suffer.  Real change is not about a single big day of celebrating interprofessionalism, it's about day after day of getting it drilled into student's brains through practical experience.

So I'll leave you with a half-baked idea: instead of spending a day talking about how we need to work together.. what if we actually spent a day working together?  What if we went elementary school-style and had field days?  Split everyone up into teams by alphabetical order, and spend all day competing in dodgeball, 3 legged relays, whiffleball?  

What if we just spent a day with our classmates, had fun with them, and in the process, learned that nursing students and medical students aren't so different after all?  This is the truth - we're all just people, and no right-minded person wants to sit and listen to lectures and run through cookie cutter small group activities on a Friday afternoon.  

See you on the other side,

from ken

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