PharmD Students Organize Local CLARION Compeition

In 1999, the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) reported that up to 98,000 hospitalized Americans die each year due to preventable medical errors. In 2002, the University of Minnesota created CLARION, an organization that aims to improve interprofessional collaboration to minimize patient quality and safety issues. In 2014, students from across the University of Cincinnati (UC) Academic Heath Center competed and received third place in the National CLARION Case Competition, which focuses on communication between health care professionals and highlights the importance of interprofessional education and development.
 
This year, in an effort to send a team to the national competition annually, two pharmacy students, Alaina Chou and Anastassia Jenjebir, created UC’s first Local Interprofessional Clinical Skills Competition, held March 24, 2018. This competition included students from the colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and allied health sciences. The purpose of this event was to foster interprofessional relationships across our academic health center and improve communication between the different disciplines with the hope that students will carry these values with them into practice after graduation. Funding was made possible with special thanks to Medpace and The Christ Hospital.

Twenty-five students participated in the competition in teams of three to four with at least two different disciplines represented per team. They developed a root-cause analysis on this year’s case—the opioid epidemic. The top three teams presented their case in a verbal round to a panel of interprofessional judges who evaluated the teams based on the context of real world practice.

The top team, Thanh Phan (pharmacy), Michael Blewett (pharmacy), and Brigid Griffin (allied health) went on to represent UC at the National CLARION Case Competition April 13 and 14.

The second place team consisted of Alec Diehl (pharmacy), Andrew Blank (pharmacy), Jeff Glasser (pharmacy), and Dara Burris (medicine), and third place was awarded to the team of William Steele (pharmacy), Joseph Schum (pharmacy), Mendi Chen (nursing), and Illana Older (nursing). 

Other participants included pharmacy students Amneh Alzatout, Lauren Williams, Richard Lincoln, Matt Hein, Samuel Huheey, Matthew Gibson, Godfred Mantey, and Kim Christen; as well as Janki Shukla, Max Yang, Ethan Simpson, and Benjamin Smith (medicine); and Anna Hocker and Julia Steffen (physical therapy).

If you are a student within the Academic Health Center and are interested in competing in next year’s Local Interprofessional Clinical Skills Competition, please contact Thomas Solomon (solomots@mail.uc.edu) or Betsy Stephens (stepheb7@mail.uc.edu).