Death, Dying, and Disposition Along the Learning Continuum: Innovations in Collaborating Across the Broad Interprofessional Team

The health practice area involving death, dying, and disposition (DDD) is by design collaborative. From its inception, holistic hospice and palliative care across settings has included physical, emotional, social, spiritual care involving families. Lesser represented Interprofessional team members often include counseling, clergy, social work, mortuary science, law, and others. Unfortunately, there is little guidance regarding academic-community collaborations in DDD interprofessional education across the learning continuum.Implementation: The UMN Center for Interprofessional Health partnered with the UMN Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program to launch an innovative 3-year task force (TF) exploring DDD IPE and resources across the learning continuum. TF leadership established 3 sub-committees to focus on DDD in didactic IPE, experiential IPE in the clinical learning environment, and publically available interprofessional DDD resources. Recruitment targeted academic faculty and community providers/experts in any related field, including clergy, law, counseling, and more. Implementation partnerships, structures, communications, and resources will be shared.Evaluation plan: The leadership steering committee established a 3-year plan for each of the 3 sub-committees’ work, including benchmarks for progression over each year. Metrics included process and impact outcomes related to DDD in didactic IPE, experiential IPE, and the curation of publically-available resources.Outcome(s) and significance: Objectives and deliverables were achieved as aimed for all three sub-committees, including a needs assessment and identified new didactic IPE in DDD, a pilot virtual interprofessional series in the experiential learning environment with topics in law, ethics, and chaplaincy, and a publically-available DDD resource curated collection in partnership with the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education. Relationships were established within and outside of the university with a high diversity of professional representation. Presenters will share lessons learned and next steps, in line with the national need for education and research to move into the health systems in pursuit of the quadruple aim.