Introducing Interprofessional Education to BSN and CLS Students Using a Simulated Healthcare Setting

Healthcare professions face complex care environments with growing attention to the number of preventable hospital deaths. Interprofessional communication and teamwork are key elements in reducing medical errors, and are core competencies of interprofessional collaborative practice. Interprofessional education occurs when students from different disciplines learn together, and/or when faculty from one discipline instruct students in another. Simulated healthcare scenarios provide high-impact learning environments for students with many benefits. Simulation-interprofessional education has been used very little between Clinical Laboratory Sciences and BSN nursing students. The faculty from a growing university sought to improve student-learning outcomes through team-teaching and student role playing in simulation and science laboratories. Two IPE projects were undertaken. Both projects demonstrated increases in the cognitive, psychomotor and affective domains of learning. ABBREVIATIONS: IPCP – Interprofessional collaborative practice, IPE – Interprofessional education, CLS – Clinical Laboratory Science, BSN – Bachelor of Science in Nursing, NSSL – Nursing Skills and Simulation Learning Center, NAACLS – National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences