Meaningfully Engaging Patients as Co-creaters in Your IPE Program: A Primer for Educators

The US National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (National Center) has adopted the needs and preferences of peoples served as the North Star of interprofessional practice. Optimum interprofessional health care teams include the patient, family, caregiver, or advocate. However, many organizations, educators, and learners face challenges when working to engage patients and advocates as members of the education team.

Since 2016, the National Center has convened the annual Nexus Summit and designed other programming to support interprofessional teams worldwide. Through these experiences, we have engaged patients and advocates in various ways, some more successful than others, in collaboratively creating, delivering, and evaluating our programming.

In this Oral Presentation, the National Center team will share strategies, lessons learned, and practical wisdom gained from nine years of patient engagement in designing education. Maryjan Fiala, our Patient Advisor, has experienced a variety of models of patient engagement and will co-lead this session, sharing her perspective on what works - and what doesn’t.Implementation: Models for patient engagement in co-creating education will include examples from the Nexus Summit 2016-2024 and other team development programming. These examples, from refining a Call for Abstracts to explicitly evaluate the degree of patient engagement in peer-reviewed sessions, to budgeting for patient reimbursement, aim to lower barriers that stand in the way of meaningful patient engagement.Evaluation plan: The National Center’s programming includes robust evaluation methods for gathering participant feedback, as well as patient partner input and debriefing. We will share effective methods to evaluate learning outcomes and improve strategy and programming over time.Outcome(s) and significance: Over nine years, the National Center has co-created programming with patient advisors and has refined strategies to lower boundaries to partnership and improve learning outcomes for interprofessional participant teams. Join the National Center and our patient advisor to gain practical skills in engaging patients to co-create education.