Our Patients, Our Teachers

Re-Imagining the Patient Panel: Introducing Lived Experiences of Psychosis into the Pre-clerkship Psychiatry Curriculum of a Canadian Medical School

The involvement of people with lived experience (patients) in medical education offers a unique opportunity for students and residents to access personal and collective knowledge about the lived experience of health, ill health, and medical care. Involvement also has the potential to elevate the role of people with lived experience and their knowledge within medicine by providing a model for meaningful collaboration and partnership. However, involvement has been critiqued by critical disability scholars for its potential to harm without leading to meaningful change in professional knowledge or practice. In this article, we (two educators with lived experience and an academic psychiatrist) describe the development and delivery of an annual lived-experience presentation about psychosis for the second-year class of a large, urban medical school in Canada. We describe our reflexive process attempting to enact meaningful involvement and disrupt the uneven power relations that shape and constrain this work, in a setting where the risks of exploitation, tokenism, and co-optation are significant. Our goal has been to re-imagine the "patient panel," which puts significant limits on the position of patients as knowers. By re-defining roles and shifting power from faculty to lived experience educators, we have aimed to present important non-medical ideas about psychosis and how to effectively support people who experience it, while disrupting interpersonal and structural bias.

Embedding Interprofessional Education in Clinical Settings: Medical and Dental Student Perceptions of a Patient Interview-Storytelling Experience

PROBLEM

Interprofessional education (IPE) is valued but difficult to deliver, given logistical and other barriers. Centering IPE around patients and grounding it in authentic practice settings are challenging within early undergraduate medical education.

APPROACH

This intervention facilitated student-patient conversations to elicit patient reflections on the health care professionals who keep them healthy and care for them when they are unwell. After being introduced to the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) core competencies, first-year medical (n = 127) and dental (n = 34) students conducted a brief semistructured patient interview, using an interview card with guiding questions, during a precepted outpatient clinic session in March-May 2021. Students transcribed patients' stories and wrote their own reflections on the interview card. These reflections were used as a stimulus for a class IPE discussion. The authors employed a pragmatic qualitative research approach to explore what students learned about interprofessional collaboration from reflecting on patients' stories.

OUTCOMES

Of the 161 students, 158 (98%) completed an interview card. Sixteen health professions were represented in patients' stories. The patients' stories prompted students to recognize and expand their understanding of the IPEC competencies. Students' responses reflected synthesis of the competencies into 3 themes: students value patient-centered holistic care as the goal of interprofessional collaboration; students reflect emerging professional and interprofessional identities in relating to patients, teams, and systems; and students appreciate interprofessional care is complex and challenging, requiring sustained effort and commitment.

NEXT STEPS

Next steps include continuing to integrate patient voices through structured conversations across the undergraduate and graduate medical education spectrum and adapting the model to support conversations with other health professionals engaged in shared patient care. These experiences could foster ongoing deliberate reflection by students on their professional and interprofessional identity development but would require investments in student time and faculty development.