December 1, 2014

A major grant proposal involving the College of Pharmacy entitled Interprofessional Health Education and Collaborative Care: A Transformative Model for the Health Sciences will be funded through the Transforming Learning for a Third Century (TLTC) initiative.  The idea behind the proposal is to expand collaborative educational efforts among the University of Michigan’s health sciences.

The $3 million TLTC grant funding will be matched by an equal amount from the Deans of the College of Pharmacy, School of Dentistry, Medical School, School of Public Health, School of Social Work, School of Nursing, and School of Kinesiology.

The five-year, $6 million program will be led by Frank Ascione, former Dean of the College of Pharmacy, and will work to transform the way faculty teach more than 4,000 health professional students, with an ultimate goal to impact the patient experience, population health, and the cost of healthcare.  Other key College of Pharmacy participants in the grant proposal process were Bruce Mueller, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Burgunda Sweet, Director of Curriculum Assessment and Clinical Professor of Pharmacy, and Anica Madeo, Program Manager of Community Engagement and Interprofessional Education.

“We are honored to be granted such a major award from the University.   These funds create an important opportunity for the health science schools to transform the way we teach our students.  We want them to better understand how to be effective partners in the collaborative health teams that will be needed in the future to deal with the complex health needs of society, locally, nationally and globally,” states Ascione.

“This grant will allow health science schools to build off of innovative work that has recently begun, such as the big team-based decision making course that is launching this Winter semester and the interprofessional service-learning course, which began in the College of Pharmacy and has now expanded to include students from a variety of health professions,” adds Madeo.

The TLTC program was created to support work such as this - work that is aimed at innovative changes to instruction with a focus on enhancing the education of UM students through high quality, engaged learning experiences.

“This proposal calls for a transformative change in the teaching culture of our health science schools.  The intent is to seek ways to break down our units’ educational silos and enable our students learn together how to deliver more effective health care as a team.  This will require us to open our curricula to each other and to grow our collaborative patient care models into cooperative learning models as well. This is a very important step forward in interprofessional education for our College and the University,” states Dean Jim Dalton.

Congratulations to all who were involved in this effort!

Read more from The University Record.