Self-assessment is considered to be a major component of learning in public health.1 It provides an opportunity for health professionals to reflect on competency-based strengths and weaknesses in order to identify learning needs and reinforce new skills or behaviors in order to improve performance. The MCH Navigator has been collecting data from our online Self-Assessment for five years and during that time have identified a number of data trends.
With over 10,000 completed assessments in the database, learners have consistently reported high levels of knowledge but low levels of skills across a number of competencies. This translates into MCH professionals having high levels of understanding of a competency but not as much self-efficacy in translating this knowledge into practice. In response to this need, the MCH Navigator has developed a series of implementation briefs that provide specific learning opportunities that focus on how to implement and execute skills associated with the MCH Leadership Competencies. This implementation brief is focused on Competency 10: Interdisciplinary/Interprofessional Team Building.
MCH systems are interdisciplinary/interprofessional (ID/IP) in nature. ID/IP practice provides a supportive environment in which the skills and expertise of team members from different disciplines, including a variety of professionals, MCH populations, and community partners, are acknowledged and seen as essential and synergistic. Input from each team member is elicited and valued in making collaborative, outcome-driven decisions to address individual, community-level, or systems-level problems2.
Interest in promoting more team-based education and interprofessional learning for U.S. health professions has been an area of importance in the field for over 40 years. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) conducted its first conference in 1972 and has convened various IOM Committees throughout the years that have produced guidelines and recommendations for how to arm health professionals with the knowledge and skills on working together and successfully implementing interprofessional collaborative practice. Most recently, in 2011, the Interprofessional Education Collaborative convened an expert panel that developed core competencies for this topic guided by 4 domains that assist in successfully implementing skills associated with interprofessional practice3.
View each of the four domains below and corresponding learning opportunities for: 1) Values/ethics for interprofessional practice, 2) Roles and responsibilities, 3) Interprofessional communication, and 4) Teams and teamwork.
References
Interdisciplinary/Interprofessional Team Building: Implementation Brief
Authors: Keisha Watson, Ph.D., MCH Navigator
Reviewers: Faculty and staff of the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development