Family Medicine Honored

ETSU’s Interprofessional Education and Research Committee recently selected two teams of applicants to be the first recipients of a new ETSU teaching award called Innovators in Interprofessional Curricula.

The award was developed by leadership in Interprofessional Education (IPE) to encourage faculty to work together to create new opportunities for students to learn in interprofessional environments,” said Dr. Jodi Polaha, assistant director of IPE and associate professor at Quillen College of Medicine. “We had five amazing applications, so we decided to fund two teams instead of just one."

The two winning teams were:

• Dr. Flo Weierbach (College of Nursing), Alicia Williams (Department of Family Medicine, Quillen College of Medicine), Dr. Kate Beatty (College of Public Health) and Dr. Kristin McHenry (College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences), who will design an online course to orient early learners across multiple colleges to interprofessional practice; and
• Dr. Matthew Tolliver (psychologist, Department of Pediatrics, Quillen College of Medicine), Dr. Will Dodd (Department of Pediatrics, Quillen College of Medicine), Dr. Julia Dodd (Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences) and Dr. Debi Thibeault (Department of Social Work, College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences), who will design a behavioral pediatrics course that spans academic and clinical settings and provides social work and psychology graduate students as well as fourth-year medical students specialized experiences in team-based care for children.

The selection committee was looking for innovative courses that would include advanced/graduate health science professions students. They encouraged collaborative efforts across colleges, departments or programs in order to redesign existing courses from two different disciplines to be combined and taught in an interprofessional manner; to redesign an existing course in one discipline to be inclusive of students from another discipline with some shared teaching; or to co-develop a new interprofessional course at the graduate or undergraduate level.

Members of the award-winning teams will earn a one-time stipend contingent upon the completion of the course design. The new courses are projected to be implemented in the 2019-20 academic year.

As the first winners of this teaching award, these teams also will be instrumental in carrying it forward in the future.

“These front-running innovators will help leadership within IPE develop a strong process for soliciting, evaluating and selecting future proposals as we plan to fund this award on an annual basis,” Polaha said.