Interprofessional Team-Based Medical Education Program at Kitasato University: Collaboration Among 14 Health-Related Professions

Abstract

Medical technology is quickly becoming more advanced and more narrowly specialized. At the same time, epidemiological and demographic profiles are changing drastically. Therefore, it would be difficult to provide the utmost health services unless various pieces of knowledge scattered across multiple health-related professions are integrated for practical application. Furthermore, as society’s needs for health services are also changing, it is no longer enough to treat the disease. Hence, the quality of health services is being looked at to humanize the process of diagnosis and treatment and to consider ethical, psychological, and social aspects of services. To provide quality health services, it is imperative for various health-related professionals, who are narrowly specialized, to closely work together as a team. This, in turn, requires urgent training of human resources so that such collaborative teamwork can smoothly take place.

Kitasato University has four health-related schools and two specialized colleges, which together educate as many as 14 types of health-related specialist professionals. The university is also known for its good clinical education in collaboration with its four affi liated hospitals. By taking advantage of these unique characteristics, the university, as a whole, embarked on the Interprofessional Team-Based Medical Education Program in 2006 as one of its key educational programs. The Program, built on the conventional school education method (so-called “vertical education”), which had already proven effective, aims to train students through collaboration among different professionals with specifi cally innovated educational methods and contents to encourage such collaboration. Through this ”cross-sectional education,“ students gain the ability to collaborate effectively with others.

Currently, the Program includes (1) the All-Kitasato Team-Based Medical Drill, which is a simulated team-based medical exercise undertaken by small groups consisting of 10 students each. The drill started in 2006 and trains about 1200 senior students from the four health-related schools and two specialized colleges each year; and (2) An Introduction to Team-Based Medicine lecture, which started in 2008 as an introductory course common to all four health-related schools. It is meant to make the collaboration in health care more systematic. The lecture is given to about 1000 freshman students each year to deepen their understanding and appreciation of team-based medicine at an early stage of their university education. It is a real-time, two-way, dialogue-style, online lecture. As subsequent steps to initiatives (1) and (2) above, the university further plans to establish (3) Team- Based Clinical Training, which will be a practical training program conducted primarily at the four university-affi liated hospitals; and (4) a system-wide University Clinical Education Center, which will coordinate clinical education collaboration and team-based clinical training among the four university-affi liated hospitals and the four health-related schools.