‘Healthcare is a team sport’: Case study event encourages collaboration, communication

As an aspiring speech language pathologist, Aurora Ingo ’25 is keenly aware of the importance of effectively collaborating and communicating with other healthcare professionals to ensure proper care for patients and clients.

“When I get a job, a main part of my career will be collaborating with doctors, nurses and other medical professionals,” said the first-year graduate student clinician in Radford University’s Master of Science in communication sciences and disorders program. “So, I think this event today is a really good activity to prepare us for what is ahead.”

Ingo was speaking minutes before participating in the Interprofessional Education (IPE) Case Study event on Oct. 31, hosted by the Waldron College of Health and Human Services’ Dr. Raymond N. Linville Center for Interprofessional Education and Practice.

The event, held in the fall and spring semesters, is designed to bring together “all of our students to learn about the different roles and responsibilities from various disciplines that they’ll be working with in their future careers,” said Jenny Hall, the associate dean for Interprofessional Education and director of the Linville Center for Interprofessional Education and Practice. “Through this event, we want to provide them with the opportunity to build their interprofessional communication and collaboration skills.”

Participating in the event were more than 300 students and faculty from Radford’s Waldron College of Health and Human Services, as well as the Colleges of Nursing, Education and Human Development, Humanities and Behavioral Sciences and the Artis College of Science and Technology. In all, students and faculty from 14 different disciplines and five Radford colleges participated in the morning-long exercise spread between the Artis Center for Adaptive Creativity and Innovation and Heth Hall.

Also attending were medical students and faculty from the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine  from nearby Blacksburg, Virginia.  

The day began with a brief round of opening statements from Hall, Waldron Dean Kenneth Cox and Provost and Senior Vice President Bethany Usher. Soon thereafter, students split into discipline-specific groups to briefly define their roles and discuss micro-cases from the perspectives of their individual disciplines. This year, with the event falling on Halloween, each case was themed to the holiday.

For example, Hall explained, “we have incidents at a pumpkin-carving party, school Halloween parade and community trunk-or-treat.”

Later, students were organized into 26 interprofessional education teams – with seven to eight disciplines represented on each team – where they examined the micro cases and a primary case of Ethan Walker, a 13-year-old boy living in rural Appalachia who was injured after falling off a haunted hayride. The teams discussed Ethan’s case within interdisciplinary groups and developed team care plans along the continuum of care.

“The ultimate goal of these exercises is to improve health outcomes for our patients,” Cox explained. “Because we know when our graduates go out into the real world, they don’t practice in isolation. Healthcare is a team sport. We want to make sure our students have that opportunity to learn in teams before they go out into the hospital settings and in the workplace.”

Waldron College aligns its IPE event and similar on-campus collaborative activities with the Interprofessional Education Collaborative competencies, Hall explained minutes before the event kicked off, which are centered around values and ethics, roles and responsibilities, interprofessional communication and teamwork.

“Students come out more excited about working in teams, and they feel more confident about their roles and responsibilities,” Hall said of the event, now in its 15th year. “It also helps them know when and where other disciplines are needed to provide holistic patient-centered care.”

Around noon, when the event wrapped up, undergraduate student Saisunni Aaron said her main takeaway from the IPE was learning the importance of collaboration with other medical professionals for better patient outcomes.

“There was an appreciation for understanding each medical professional role, and I loved how we all learned something new about each other,” said the senior respiratory therapy major from Martinsville, Virginia. “I think this event opened doors for better communication with each other in the real world.”

Ingo, the graduate student clinician, said her main takeaway was learning “how different professions can work toward the same goals from different perspectives, and how much overlap and collaboration there can be between disciplines.

“I also realized that by educating each other about our roles,” she continued, “we can better work together toward the same goal of helping the patient.”