Peoria Immersion Day earns I-TEAM award
Program brings student collaboration to interprofessional case-based scenarios Heading link
The Peoria Immersion Day program for interprofessional education was awarded the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs’s 2022 I-TEAM award, an annual award given to faculty and staff who have demonstrated excellence in interprofessional practice and education.
From UIC Nursing, the team includes faculty and staff representing four campuses, including: Quad Cities director Kathleen Sparbel, PhD, FNP-BC; Quad Cities office manager Claire DeConte; Peoria DNP student Angela O’Bryant, MSN, RN; Springfield campus director Sara McPherson, PhD, RN, CNE; and Urbana campus director Krista Jones, DNP, MS, RN, PHNA-BC.
The team, which also includes faculty and staff representing pharmacy, social work, medicine and dentistry, will receive $2,500.
Peoria Immersion Day has traditionally been held each spring in Peoria’s Jump Simulation Center, bringing together students from health disciplines at UIC, the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and Bradley University, to work on interprofessional case-based scenarios.
In March 2020, just weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, the program’s planners quickly transitioned to a virtual format. That continued in 2021 and 2022. Sparbel says this new virtual format allowed the program to grow from a maximum of 270 participants in person to 470 participants this year.
The program has also evolved to build upon a Foundations of Interprofessional Collaborative Practice course now offered for all UIC health profession programs. Sparbel says the immersion day offers scenario-based “next steps application and practice, with the assumption that students already know the foundational IPE content.”
“This interprofessional event allowed us to learn how to work with the standardized patient and prepare for real world scenarios. The controlled environment gave us the chance to practice our roles with one another and learn from any mistakes or improve on this collaborative process,” said pharmacy student Alex Nunez, as quoted in the I-TEAM award application.