Designing the Interprofessional CLE of the Future: Lessons from Two Clinic Start-ups

Numerous organizations, like NCICLE and ACGME, have advanced our understanding and recognition of optimal interprofessional clinical learning environments (CLEs). To date, however, there are few guides for operationalizing essential elements of CLEs in real-world practices. This seminar uses the insights and lessons from two different interprofessional CLE start-up projects, one associated with multiple academic and clinical partners and one being developed in concert with plans for a new family medicine residency program. The aim of both projects is to design transformative learning environments that integrate and embed interprofessional practice, education, and research.

The objectives of this seminar are for participants to:

1. Prioritize essential components of a transformative CLE
2. Propose strategies to operationalize 1-2 of these essential components
3. Select evaluation metrics and a compelling rationale for using them

The outline for the seminar is:

1. Introduction to the Seminar (5 minutes)
   1. Goals
   2. Characteristics of the Optimal CLE – what we know
2. Essential components of a transformative CLE (10 minutes) - Facilitated Brainstorming Activity: All participants
   1. What are the priorities for an optimal CLE?
   2. What’s missing from current literature?
   3. What are the major challenges?
3. Building the essential components of a transformative CLE (25 minutes)
   1. Small group exercise: Each small group will select one component and work on a prototype to answer: what must be present to make this component successful? Name one measure you will use to evaluate success of this component in your transformative CLE.
4. Report out – all participants (20 minutes)
   1. Each of 4 small groups has 5 minutes to name their component, describe their prototype and evaluation measure.

During the seminar, participants will be able to refamiliarize themselves with characteristics of a CLE and brainstorm with each other about characteristics that would ramp a good CLE to a transformative one. Examples from two CLE start-ups will be used to prompt creative and broad-based thinking. Participants then will use rapid prototyping activities to visualize steps to operationalize and evaluate a small part of one essential characteristic. They will see how other small groups complete the same task and through a large group report out be able to take out a variety of concrete ideas for developing or improving their current CLEs. Seminar facilitators will use their current experience in two CLE start-ups to provide examples of ways to prototype challenging components of CLEs.