A three-year, almost $500,000 grant from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation will help enhance interprofessional educated at the medical school.
The grant will fund the project, "A Multi-Institution Effort to Advance Professionalism and Interprofessional Education with ProfessionalFormation.Org," which WMed is a part of along with 11 medical schools and Drexel University, the lead institution on the project.
"This is a way to really develop, and to accomplish, one of the primary goals of WMed which is to be a leader in IPE,"said Tyler S. Gibb, JD, PhD, co-chief of WMed's Program in Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law, who is a member of the medical school's Education and Workplace Committee and charged with professionalism remediation for medical students and residents.
ProfessionalFormation.org, also known as PFO, is a website that was implemented by faculty at Drexel College of Medicine for teaching, assessing and remediating gaps in professional and interprofessional behaviors in healthcare.
With the grant from the Macy Foundation, which was announced in January, Dr. Gibb said the valuable training materials from PFO will now be available to WMed and the other partner institutions through a partnership that PFO has forged with the Academy of Professionalism in Healthcare (APHC). In addition to WMed, the materials will also be used by students at Western Michigan University's schools of law, and nursing and social work, as well as Ferris State University's College of Pharmacy.
Dr. Gibb said the schools at WMU and Ferris State are partnering with WMed and wrote letters of support for WMed being named one of the institutions to team with Drexel University on the grant.
The co-principal investigators on the PFO project are Dennis Novack, MD, associate dean of Medical Education at Drexel University College of Medicine, and Kymberlee Montgomery, DNP, chair of the Nurse Practitioner Program at Drexel University.
In addition to WMed, the other institutions teaming up with Drexel University on the grant are: Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Commonwealth Medical College, Duquesne University, Indiana University, Jefferson College, Ohio State University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Stony Brook, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley.
As a leader of a collaborating institution on the grant, Dr. Gibb said he will take part in a kickoff retreat in July at Drexel during which more details about moving forward on the PFO grant will be ironed out.
Dr. Gibb said he is excited about the project, which he believes will help with the goal of making interprofessional education a more integrated part of the curriculum for undergraduate and graduate medical education at WMed, with high-quality education materials, as well as valuable assessment and remediation tools "that can help us be a leader in the state regarding IPE education."
"I'm encouraged by not only the grant and the support, but also that the material that will be available and that throughout the process we were able to get a lot of people connected locally," Dr. Gibb said. "Being able to formalize those relationships and being able to have the support moving forward is really important."