IPE and VTE: An Educator's Portion of Alphabet Soup

Reduction of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in hospitalized patients: aligning continuing education with interprofessional team-based quality improvement in an academic medical center.  Pingleton SK, Carlton E, Wilkinson S, Beasley J, King T, Wittkopp C, Moncure M, Williamson T. Acad Med. 2013; 88(10):1454-1459. Available online from the Baystate Health Sciences Library, or from PubMed at your institution. 

I am an educator. Aside from observing some of my clinical colleagues, my only real clinical experience involves helping to restrain my young sons for flu shots. However, when my colleague suggested that this article - about an interprofessional effort to decrease incidence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) - is a view of how clinicians might think of interprofessional education, I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to muscle through clinical-ease to find the nuggets of educational insight.

To my delight, the clinical world's fondness for acronyms has once again eased the burden of a taxing vocabulary, as we read in this article about KU's VTE data, the KUH intranet, PICCs, and BPAs. Served up with this alphabet soup is the real gem of this article - the planning matrix, described as a way of mapping the "types of interventions ... on the learners' stages of acceptance..." Take a look at Table 1, and you'll that this is a very neat and souped-up way of saying they took time to design a curriculum. This thoughtful approach was also evident in how they treated their interprofessional group of learners - by considering the breakdown of responsibilities in decreasing VTE incidence. 

The article lacks in a basic way; their outcome is a view of the decrease in VTE incidence. Clinical education is designed to improve patient outcomes by changing provider behaviors which then change their approach to patient care. As educators, we should be measuring the extent to which our efforts change behavior as well as the change in patient outcomes. This offers a clearer picture of the link between educational efforts and VTE incidence. 

Overall, this article is a good view of the way that educational efforts - particularly interprofessional ones - are being designed to improve patient outcomes. The secret of their success? Having a clearly defined problem and a thoughtful, interprofessional curriculum designed to fix it. Now that's a recipe you'll want to steal. 

Bottom Line:

IPE is used to decrease VTE - view this as a window into the link between educators and patients. For a fun activity, apply the points from Kanter's editorial outlining a better process for writing about innovations onto this article to see how the authors' successfully put the spotlight on the problem before their innovative solution takes center stage.