Description of the Experience
Interprofessional Care for Autism Spectrum Disorder, Spring 2019, members involved were from different professions of the college, mainly physical therapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy, dental hygiene. There were other professionals represented but not a formal teacher for psychology and audiology. My role in this experience was to bring an audiologist perspective to each different class. We followed a child through multiple visits to different professions and also talked about coordinated care for the child and their family. Each time I learned about a different profession, the group would then discuss accordingly and then also give input on how actions with one professional might be impacting another professional.
Interprofessional Competencies
After completing this experience, I am able to:
- Communication: CC2. Communicate information with patients, families, community members, and health team members in a form that is understandable, avoiding discipline-specific terminology when possible.
- Team and Teamwork: TT 11. Perform effectively on teams and in different team roles in a variety of settings.
- Values and Ethics: VE 10. Maintain competence in one’s own profession appropriate to scope of practice.
Reflection
Interprofessional team-based care: Care delivered by intentionally created, usually relatively small workgroups in health care who are recognized by others as well as by themselves as having a collective identity and shared responsibility for a patient or group of patients (e.g., rapid response team, palliative care team, primary care team, and operating room team). (IPEC, 2016, p. 8). This experience not only taught me the importance of team-based care when it comes to working with people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but also how much one profession can impact another. Throughout this class, I learned a glimpse of what each profession can do for a child with ASD and how communication between professionals is necessary for effective outcomes.
1. Interprofessional Communication: CC2. Communicate information with patients, families, community members, and health team members in a form that is understandable, avoiding discipline-specific terminology when possible. This competency was something I learned and continued to develop in each class. As we further discussed the case and talked about it from different professional standpoints, I realized that not only myself but other professionals get stuck in the jargon of their profession. I consistently found myself trying to reword myself to terminology that is not specific to audiology. When I started this class, I tried my best to use less discipline-specific terminology, and it was not until you are presenting that information in front of other people that you realize they do not understand what you are talking about. It is easy to hide behind a professional report with jargon, but it was eye-opening to see other people’s reactions face to face. This has helped me a lot with my off-campus placements, where professional reports get sent out daily to referring physicians and other health professionals.
2. Team and Teamwork: TT 11. Perform effectively on teams and in different team roles in a variety of settings. Each week we were put into a group; this not only taught me how to work effectively with a team, but also work with different people who are in the same profession. I was able to demonstrate that I can work effectively with diverse groups of teams by respecting everyone’s opinion and what they brought to the conversation. Sometimes we would be speaking on a profession that was not represented in our group and therefore did not have a natural leader of the conversation. One day, there was another student and me who spoke about our experience working with children with ASD: therefore, we both felt more comfortable taking on those leadership positions to help guide the conversation. Some weeks I would participate and bring a lot of insight, and other weeks I would sit back and gain knowledge from my peers with minor insight because of my lack of understanding of the profession.
3. Values and Ethics: VE 10. Maintain competence in one’s own profession appropriate to scope of practice. This was also exhibited throughout the entire semester because of how the class was structured. We would spend time talking about one profession one week and then another profession the next. Just form my own experiences, I understood a little about some professions and gained more insight into others. It helped me not only how our professions overlapped, but when prompted with a question by another professional, I knew when to help define my scope a little more. This is very relevant to the profession of Audiology because we study hearing and balance disorders and we know a lot about the ear and balance system; however, when there is an infection in the outer ear or middle ear, we can note that on a patients chart but cannot diagnose it, it has to be done by a physician or ENT. Similarly, when we speak about balance, we can test the vestibular system to see if there are any problems; yet, there are three main contributions to balance, the vestibular system, vision, and proprioception. So although Audiologists can detect balance disturbance, we can refer to a physical or occupational therapist for the rehabilitation of the balance system if we cannot provide those services. Understanding the limitations and scope of one’s practice is very important for providing care, and this experience gave me practice with outlining that for multiple different professionals.