HPSLC Corner
HPSLC’s Big Plans
The Health Professional Student Leadership Council kicked off the year with a back to school pickleball social in Forest Park. The event turned out over 90 students with representation from all 7 health profession programs! HPSLC is also pioneering the new Vot-ER initiative. We have tabled throughout campus and at various community events to encourage health professionals and patients to register to vote. We also continue volunteering with Care STL Health and RCS to give back to the STL community. Our upcoming events include a fall case study night on November 6th! Case study nights are a great way to collaborate, hear from different perspectives in various fields, and get to know other students. Then we have our ‘Winter Thaw’ event tentatively planned for January to welcome students back for the spring semester with great food and atmosphere. In the spring, we’ll have another case study night as well. We are very excited for all the events that HPSLC has planned for the year!
Check out this year’s Board and Member at Large representatives from each of the CIPE Programs! Follow HPSLC on Facebook and Instagram or send us an email.
Vot-ER
Health professionals face unique challenges when it comes to voting, often due to busy work schedules or simply not being registered. Despite their essential role in shaping public health, physicians are 12% less likely to vote, and registered nurses 10% less likely. To address this, the Health Professional Student Leadership Council (HPSLC), in partnership with Vot-ER, is taking action to increase voter registration among healthcare professionals and patients at the Medical Campus.
HPSLC employs a three-pronged approach: engage health professional students and faculty to promote civic engagement, equip clinical staff with resources and tools such as Vot-ER badges for assisting with voter registration, and empower patients through sharing information on emergency voting options. This approach has been implemented through activities such as tabling events, conducting an interprofessional education workshop on voting as a social determinant of health and integrating voter registration into new student orientation. So far, these efforts have resulted in 413 newly registered voters!
Additionally, this initiative has successfully integrated voter registration into the Washington University Interprofessional Pro-Bono Clinic’s intake process. By rephrasing a question on the clinic’s intake form to ask, “Are you interested in learning more about registering to vote?” patients are given a natural, non-intrusive way to engage with voter resources, alongside other assistance like food or utility services.
By weaving civic engagement into healthcare settings, HPSLC is making strides toward closing the voter participation gap for both healthcare professionals and patients. Click here to learn more about voting and registering to vote!
Rifhan Ideris, MPH student & CIPE intern Summer 2024
Lauren Linomaz, Nursing student & Vot-ER Co-Captain AY24-25
Emily Floramo, OT student & Vot-ER Co-Captain AY24-25
Volunteering at CareSTL Health
Joyce Djikeng, a 3rd year Occupational Therapy doctoral student, presented during CareSTL Health‘s annual Baby Shower event in September. Joyce shared information about women’s health during pregnancy.
Curriculum
The CIPE launched Foundational Activities Modules in August for health profession programs to implement within their courses. CIPE Curriculum and Assessment Committee (CAC) members have access to the module content, though information about the CIPE professions and videos of professionals in action is publicly available HERE.
Adam Snowden, 4th year MD student representative on the CAC, is leading the charge to update information about the Day in the Life of students from each of the programs – stay tuned for that in the Spring. Meanwhile, the CAC is developing a new interprofessional case discussion for October 2025 that will build on the Foundational Activity content.
Student-Resident Teaching Certificate Program
“It was a fantastic experience!”
Fourth-year medical student, Alberto Sobrero,
shares highlights of the
Student-Resident IPE
Teaching Certificate program
Participating in the Student-Resident IPE Teaching Certificate program was a fantastic experience! It was an absolute treat to interact with and learn from students from several other professions. One of the sessions involved us working together to find patient safety concerns in a simulated hospital room. Everyone brought their unique perspective to the table openly and eagerly, which created a truly collaborative environment and helped us find a lot more concerns than if we had acted individually. It was a great reminder that learning to work efficiently within an interprofessional team will help us achieve better patient outcomes!
I am also so grateful for the wonderful guidance I received from established educators and faculty with extensive interprofessional experience. Learning from leaders who have spent years honing their education, collaboration, and healthcare skills was incredible. As a great example of this, we had the opportunity to facilitate an interprofessional education session for earlier learners. This was a great opportunity to put theory into practice. I was paired with an experienced facilitator from the PT program. She offered great advice, and we worked together to develop a facilitation plan that we were both happy with. This lowered the stakes and made me confident in applying our newly learned skills. At the we debriefed the session and shared feedback to improve our facilitation and mentoring skills even further.
Lastly, I appreciated the program’s flexible scheduling. As busy interprofessional students, our time is often stretched thin. However, the program’s design allowed us to engage with the content and sessions when we were able, which helped me make the most of the program!
Learn about the certificate program
Care Coordination
CIPE doubled the number of teams and students this year in our Care Coordination experience through a newly-developed partnership with CareSTL Health. Each of four teams is comprised of a senior-level student from medicine, nursing, occupational therapy and pharmacy. CareSTL Health community health workers serve as their coaches, and their patients will become connected to the student teams who will help them navigate the health care system and social determinant of health barriers.
Of note, many of the students involved in Care Coordination this year also participated in the Student-Resident Teaching Certificate Program.
CIPE Presentations
CIPE Director Heather Hageman was featured on Episode 11 of the local Well-Developed Podcast series produced by Erin Herrera, CRNA, Associate Vice Chair for Well-Being, and Assistant Director for CRNA Activities, and Rachel Moquin, EdD, Assistant Professor and Director of Learning and Development. The series intends to bridge the gap between well-being and professional development.
The Standardized Patient Team Experience (SPTE) leads presented two posters this fall about how they have improved the team feedback quality to students.
- OE Education Day, October 15
- BJH Multidisciplinary Day, October 16
CIPE’s previous Public Health intern, Rifhan Ideris, is presenting a poster about his research around the Vot-ER initiative and working with HPSLC to implement their approach.
- Public Health at WashU Annual Conference, October 21 & 22 come see us!
See our research projects and these posters here.
Resources for IPE Facilitators & Collaborative Practice
The National Collaborative for Improving the Clinical Learning Environment has released its Teaming Resources Compendium. Available on the CIPE Tools for IPE & CP Page. Those of you who would like to take a quick pulse of your clinical learning environment might be interested in the Clinical Learning Environment Quick Survey (CLEQS).