The Farm Show: A Rural Healthcare Focus on Interprofessional Education

The Farm Show, an event that highlights agricultural equipment and products, provided an opportunity for interprofessional education and collaboration with a rural healthcare focus on serving the farming community. The Farm Show experience was comprised of three learning opportunities. A pre-event meeting allowed students and faculty from medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and communication disorders to learn with, from, and about one another through exploration of their roles in caring for this population and developing mentorship skills through interprofessional training on the various screening tools implemented at the booth. During the farm show event, students and faculty formed interprofessional groups to provide community-based care and resources to the farming community through education about the roles of the healthcare professionals in promoting well-being and basic health screens focused on cardiovascular health, strength and balance screens, and skin cancer prevention. The interactions with fellow healthcare students and faculty, students promoted the development of leadership skills through advocacy efforts and community engagement. The post-event meeting provided an opportunity for interprofessional collaboration and debriefing as students completed the Jefferson Teamwork Observation Guide (JTOG) (Lyons et al., 2016), shared influential experiences that occurred throughout the series of events, and reflected on how these experiences will impact their future professional interactions and service to the farming community.

This Lighting Talk will provide background information on how the learning experience was organized to ensure students had the opportunity to engage with the farming community in an intentional manner, outcomes related to the impact of the learning experience, and student perceptions of methods to provide better healthcare services to the farming community. The outcomes obtained through the JTOG and post-event reflections will also be shared as a means of providing participants will tangible methods for developing a similar learning experience in their communities.

Disclosures:

In accordance with the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s Standards for Commercial Support, adopted by the Joint Accreditors for Interprofessional Continuing Education, the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education has a conflict of interest policy that requires that all individuals involved in the development of activity content disclose their relevant financial relationships with commercial interests. All potential conflicts of interest that arise based upon these financial relationships are resolved prior to the educational activity.

Jennifer Mackey, Cathy Leslie, Elise Townsend, Alison Naber, Susan Anderson, Kathrin Eliot, Karen Luce, Kathryn Konrad, Whitney Lucas Molitor, Tracy Cleveland, Sabina Kuperschmidt, Kory Zimney, Chelsea Wesner, Brooke Burk, Megan Mahowald

declare no vested interest in or affiliation with any commercial interest offering financial support for this interprofessional continuing education activity, or any affiliation with a commercial interest whose philosophy could potentially bias their presentation.