USF health faculty participates in poverty simulation

Healthcare is not defined solely by what happens in the emergency room or thedoctor’s office. Patients bring with them their illnesses and theirchronic conditions, but they also bring the barriers they face throughouttheir lives that can influence or even compromise their care. This isespecially true for people in poverty who may lack the money formedication, have no consistent means of making it to their doctor’sappointments or are in danger of losing their homes or their children.These stressors not only complicate how they receive and adhere to thecare recommendations of their health care providers, but can alsoexacerbate their conditions.

TheUSF Health Morsani College of Medicine has long understoodthat physicians cannot expect to help patients circumvent these obstacleson their own. Interprofessional cooperation with health care workers ofother disciplines or representatives of community organizations can be apowerful tool to help understand what a patient is going through and howto get them the help they need. USF Health Office of StudentDiversity and Enrichment regularly facilitates interprofessional education(IPE) experiences that help students prepare for this kindof partnership.

Faculty from across USF Health recently sampled some of these educational experiences as they role played patients in a simulation exercise designed to show the struggles people in poverty face and how those barriers can make caring for themselves and their families difficult.

“The idea behind this day is to train us, the faculty, to better understand what it’s like to be poor, how poverty impacts our ability as caregivers to provide care to them,” said Charles Lockwood, MD, MHCM, senior vice president at USF Health and dean of the Morsani College of Medicine.

In addition to the simulation, the leaders held networking sessions to create new interprofessional partnerships as well as discussed the future of IPE at USF Health. “I think people responded very positively to this exercise because it brought us together in ways that we don’t usually experience,” said Donna Petersen, ScD, MHS, CPH, senior associate vice president of USF Health and dean of the USF Health College of Public Health.

The group also heard a presentation of USF Health’s entry in this year’s Clarion Case Competition. The competition calls for interprofessional groups of students from multiple medical disciplines to study a fictitious case involving a patient suffering a sentinel event and analyze what happened and what changes could be made to prevent such an event in the future.

“I think the day was an extreme success,”said Haru Okuda,MD, FACEP, FSSH, executive director for USF Health Interprofessional Educationand Practice (IPEP) and executive director of the Center for Advanced MedicalLearning and Simulation (CAMLS). “We saw lots of smiles and frustrations butreal emotions that I think allowed the faculty to really understand thechallenges that people in poverty go through.”