UMEC Spotlight on Faculty Development: Sara Petruska, MD
Meet Sara Petruska, MD, of University of Louisville
Presenter at the 2017 Martin L. Stone, MD, Faculty Development Seminar
“Circle the Wagons: Bringing Medical Students into the Fold with Interprofessional Education on Labor and Delivery”
After a doctor has been in the medical field for several years, they likely know the importance of collaborating with other medical professionals, particularly nurses. Medical students, though, might not have come to that realization yet. In 1999, as a third-year medical student at the University of Florida, Sara Petruska, MD, was required to spend a day working with Labor and Delivery nurses. This was, Doctor Petruska says, “a transformative experience, which taught me to listen to nurses.” Now, as Clerkship Director at University of Louisville, she works to build a similar experience for her students. “I’ve learned that shadowing a nurse is interprofessional collaboration and becomes interprofessional education when medical and nursing students learn together.”
At the 2017 Martin L. Stone, MD, Faculty Development Seminar, Doctor Petruska (along with Nathalie Feldman, MD, and Nancy Hueppchen, MD, MSc) presented on “Circle the Wagons: Bringing Medical Students into the Fold with Interprofessional Education on Labor and Delivery” on Tuesday, January 10, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Indian Wells near Palm Springs, California.
APGO: What are the resources that you found most useful (including APGO resources)?
Doctor Petruska: Over the past several years, I’ve focused on IPE-related offerings at the AAMC Learn-Serve-Lead conference. The online resources at the Interprofessional Education Collaborative are very helpful. Our session at this year’s Martin Stone Faculty Development Seminar grew out of a session last year in which Nathalie Feldman, MD, and Elise Everett, MD, presented their thoughts on pairing students and nurses together with a goal of decreasing reports of medical student mistreatment. Nancy Huepchenn attended that session and contributed her longstanding experience in the area. That kind of exchange between faculty at different institutions is one of the richest possible resources for what we do as clerkship directors, and it’s where APGO becomes so much more than the sum of its parts.
APGO: What challenges did you encounter when developing your program? What was the solution?
Doctor Petruska: Logistics and scheduling are always a challenge for IPE—like many, our School of Nursing runs on a different calendar than the medical school. We found that the senior nursing students in the Capstone in Women’s Health Program, making it easier to plan collaboration.
APGO: What are one to three things that you hope people who attend your presentation at the Faculty Development Seminar take home with them?
Doctor Petruska: It’s achievable to start small with IPE on the clerkship, and in addition to prepare our students to be collaborative team members as physicians in the future, IPE may help students with their current roles on the health care team.
For more informative sessions such as Doctor Petruska’s, mark your calendar for the 2018 APGO’s Martin L. Stone, MD, Faculty Development Seminar to be held at the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa in Manalapan, Florida from January 6-9, 2018.