The CAIPER Blog

August 17, 2022

By Gerri Lamb

Academic-clinical partnerships are the touchstones for successful interprofessional practice and education programs. Lessons about teamwork and collaboration may start in the classroom but they must be solidified through application in real-world settings. Much of the literature on academic-clinical partnerships for interprofessional practice and education emphasize foundational aspects like having a common vision or shared mental model between organizations. While these aspects along with senior leadership, support, and mutual incentives to work together are certainly critical, we wanted to ask here: 

Three years ago, administrators and faculty from Arizona State University’s (ASU) CAIPER, Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, and the College of Health Solutions, and Dignity Health launched a new collaboration to “transform primary care.” Even before COVID-19, we knew that primary care needed new thinking and new models of practice and education to address the many challenges before it, a perspective confirmed and accelerated by the National Academies 2021 report on Implementing High-Quality Primary Care: Rebuilding the Foundation of Health Care. We purposely built time into our grant timeline to focus on partnering to allow us to develop an infrastructure to work together, such as putting together a senior advisory group with members from both ASU and Dignity Health. 

Over the past three years, our partnership has taken us to many unexpected places and to important successes. We have touched, connected with, asked for help and support from many, many people at ASU and Dignity. We have asked questions that have led to changes in interprofessional student clinical experiences, Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols, use of the electronic health record to support teamwork and more. We have completed multiple small tests of change with promising outcomes. 

We recently held a team meeting in which we asked each other: What has been important in achieving our goals?  

Here are a few of our team’s observations about critical ingredients in moving academic-clinical partnerships from beginning infrastructure stages to meaningful and ideally, sustained impact.

Partnering across large complex organizations is messy and challenging. In our experience, it is critical to put effort into making the key processes of partnership, like open communication, transparency, and attention to mutual benefit of team members evident in every interaction. When these processes are part of the team’s DNA, members show up, enjoy working together, and get the work done.

Kristin Will, Project Co-Investigator, said:

“I checked out characteristics of successful partnerships in the literature…respectful relationships, key champions, measurable results, etc.. We’re working on them all.”

Team members provide an entrée to multiple stakeholders who affect the success of interprofessional initiatives. Their relationships with these diverse groups open doors and pave the way to changes. Our team members who work with our IRBs, for instance, have been instrumental in helping to make the process of incorporating students in clinical research more efficient. Collaboration among our team members and informatics staff have identified fixable issues in making EHR documentation more effective and less time-consuming for providers and students.

Nina Karamehmedovic, Grant Project Manager, said:

“Team composition is important. Our team members work across different spheres of influence - research and IRB, clinical practice, faculty, finance, project management. Their knowledge informs our decisions and helps us be mindful about the inevitable politics in everything we do.”

Scope creep is common in interprofessional work. So are unexpected hurdles. Keeping an eye on the ball – the intended outcomes – is the work of all team members. We regularly review our goals at team meetings and have candid conversations about progress on them. We remind each other that “there’s always a plan B.” If one strategy does not work, move on to the next and the next…

Alana Ridge, Project IRB Compliance Liaison, said:

 “All of us are impact players. We’re not just going through the motions. We're looking at how we can have the most impact and figure out these problems when the environment is constantly shifting.”  

Impactful teams and their leaders plan for transitions in team members and make sure new team members have the footing and support to be effective as quickly as possible. The constant networking required in interprofessional work often results in meeting individuals who you did not know about at first but find are incredible assets. Team members also may leave creating vacuums in expertise and experience. Team leaders play a critical role in maintaining relationships and impact by guiding their organizations and teams through these changes. Ideally, they have both visibility and influence to navigate them smoothly.

Richard Kratche, Project Co-Principal Investigator, said:

“Having visible leaders and champions from the beginning made it possible for me to hit the ground running when I joined the team. If I were trying to start this de novo, it would have been a much steeper hill to climb.”

Academic-clinical partnerships are central to optimizing and integrating interprofessional practice and education. Our experience affirms that partnerships that move to impact must be nurtured and worked on by the individuals and teams doing the work at the grass-roots level. We invite you to share your insights and strategies.

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