An interprofessional education approach to pain management through a standardized patient encounter

Interprofessional education and collaborative practice requirements of professional health programs have resulted in collaborative learning programming in nearly all health professions. Due to recent initiatives for contemporary education of health professionals on pain science education, an academic health science center at a large public southeastern university created a focused interprofessional learning activity on pain science education within its curriculum. The learning objectives for this session aligned with both the core competencies from the Interprofessional Education Collaborative and the International Association for the Study of Pain. In a two-year period, nearly 750 students participated in this interprofessional pain science education session from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and behavioral health. The session involved a standardized patient encounter for a patient presenting with chronic pain. Both faculty observers and the standardized patients assessed student teams on their interprofessional competencies during the activity, who then discussed findings prior to faculty-student debriefings. Faculty and standardized patient raters agreed that student groups demonstrated very strong skills in communication, information sharing, and solicitation of patient/client input during the event. Other skills were met with some level of disagreement. This session identifies the potential impact of interprofessional learning that can transpire through a standardized patient experience with modeling of activities in association with contemporary pain science education competencies. Future models of this program should include further assessment of interprofessional learning from students of all health care disciplines as well as continued solicitation of input from the patient or standardized patients.