Event Description: 

This event brought together first year students from the different professional healthcare programs including Dietetics, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacology among numerous others. This event provided the opportunity interact with our future colleagues, and gain insight into the importance of an inter-professional healthcare team in providing superior patient centred care.

Reflection: 

Over all I found attending the Inter-professional Heath mixer to be an insightful, and enjoyable experience. As this mixer was intended for students in the first years of their respective programs, I thought it was a great opportunity to form some connections with people in other fields, before we are all subjected to potential biases and opinions from specific professions.I think the fact that the event included only first year student, right when we are starting in are programs was very beneficial. As I said above, although I think that healthcare professionals must always communicate in a manner that treats everyone as equals, I feel that as people move forward in their careers, their views will solidify, and that they may become biased in their opinions. This may add an extra layer of complexity when coming together as an inter-professional health care team. I believe that opportunities such as these will help a number of people, including myself, work more efficiently in teams, and will help them be more self aware of how they share their views in a group. I also feel that having the event at the beginning of the semester, when we are all new to our programs was a great idea. I feel that this left people more open to interacting with people outside of their profession, as not enough time has passed for groups of close friends to form within each program. This likely would have caused individuals to interact mainly with people in their own programs, rather than people from other programs.

This experience also gave me further in sight to the amount of knowledge that can be achieved by bringing together many people of different specialties. The team I was in was quite diverse having each of a medical, nursing and dietetics student, as well as two pharmacology students. This diversity of knowledge became very apparent to me when we were completing the case study, which included medical, medication, and nutrition related aspects. It was quite interesting, because as we were going through the case, each of us brought insight to the case from the perspective of our own fields of study. For example, I as the dietetics student was able to contribute possible effects caused by a high intake of vitamin A, while the pharmacology students we able to identify the purpose of the mentioned medications, and the medical and nursing students were able to suggest causes for the physical symptoms. Collaboratively we worked together to successfully come up with the three most probable challenges the person in our case study may face. This outcome would not have been achieved without collaboration, because none of us as individuals have all the knowledge that we were able to accumulate as a group.

This experience really opened my eyes to how important the incorporation of different areas of expertise are to provide superior patient centered care, and how everyone on a healthcare team really work as equals rather than in a hierarchy.  I thoroughly enjoyed this experience, and hope to have other such collaborative opportunities in the future.