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Team-Based Teaching Clinic

student physicians confer with a patient in an exam room

Vision Statement:

Through interprofessional team-based work, we will elevate our care to achieve better experiences and outcomes.

Basics:

The Team-Based Teaching Clinic (TBTC) is a unique clinical setting within the Family Medicine clinic. In this setting, teams of University of Kansas students work to provide care to complex patients. These teams include learners from medicine, pharmacy, nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral health, dietetics and nursing.

Interprofessional Learning Objectives

  • Learning about roles and scopes (uniqueness of each profession, too)
  • Issues of expertise and knowledge sharing, contribution
  • Learning how to blend profession-specific processes into a team encounter
  • Consensus building: a concept of communication, modeling, behavior
  • Building a shared plan
  • Considering the value of interprofessional work
  • Considering the ethics of IP work
  • Learning about the patient's role in the team -- issues of rights, dignity and diversity.

Schedule:

The TBTC currently functions for four sessions each week -- Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and Wednesday afternoons. Morning sessions begin at 8 a.m. and the afternoon session begins at 1 p.m. Each session has a schedule for two physicians with eight patients apiece. We form four teams with the expectation that each team will see at least three patients.

Clinic Flow:

Students, residents and faculty are asked to arrive 15 minutes prior to the start of the clinic session.

Students huddle prior to seeing each patient, spend 15-20 minutes in the room with the patient and huddle again afterward to discuss their assessment and plan. The team then presents to the physician and the entire group returns to the patient room to complete the visit.

All student work will stop in the final half hour of each session for a formal faculty-led debriefing. This offers discrete time to consider interprofessional skills and behaviors.

We understand that the future of health care will be delivered in a collaborative interprofessional way. This innovative program is building a strong tradition of learning and practice to help students prepare for the collaborative interprofessional healthcare world of tomorrow.

medical students discuss case with professors

KU School of Medicine

University of Kansas Medical Center
Family Medicine & Community Health
3901 Rainbow Boulevard
Mailstop 4010
Kansas City, KS 66160