VCU news

By Malorie Burkett

A team of Virginia Commonwealth University students won first place in the CLARION National Case Competition — designed and administered by medical students in response to what they see as the need for interprofessional education to improve quality and patient safety in health care.

“The team represents the ideal problem solving and communication efforts that will be the new infrastructure that undergirds a radical transformation of our health care delivery system,” said Kenneth White, Ph.D., professor and director of the graduate program in health administration and faculty adviser for the team. “It is nice to be on the crest of this wave in transforming patient care and improving quality.”

This year’s VCU team was made up of health administration students who also represented other health disciplines. It included team captain Emily Tafel; Joga Ivatury, who also represented medicine; Zach McCluskey, who represented nursing; and Veronica Sikka, who represented public health and medicine.

This year's CLARION case focused on a Somali immigrant, who was afflicted with pediatric asthma in a rural health care setting. The team identified level of communication and level of training/competency as the root causes and identified several recommendations for a specific case to the judges.

CLARION is a University of Minnesota student organization dedicated to improving health care through interprofessional collaboration.

According to CLARION, issues of quality and patient safety in health care have received national attention since a report released by the Institute of Medicine in 1999 indicated that as many as 98,000 people in America may die each year due to medical errors.

With a lack of communication being cited as one possible cause of these errors, interprofessional education has come to the forefront of health care curricula everywhere.

VCU competed against eight other schools: the University of Chicago, the University of Connecticut, Dartmouth University, the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, the University of Missouri, the University of Tennessee and the University of Washington.

VCU faculty, alumni and other health care leaders in the community advised the team, which also was sponsored by Bon Secours-Richmond Health System.

As first place winners, the students will receive a $5,000 team scholarship and acknowledgement at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's National Forum.

For more information and to read the case for the competition, visit http://www.chip.umn.edu/CHIP/committees/clarion.html.