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McMaster “PIPER”
receives national recognition
By Lorie Shimmell, director of clinical education, OT and Susan Baptiste, acting assistant dean, MScOT program
T
he McMaster Program of Interprofessional Practice Educa-
tion and Research (PIPER) has received the prestigious
national Alan Blizzard Award from the Society for Teaching
and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE). The PIPER team has
been driven by the shared vision of faculty members across the
educational programs within the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS)
at McMaster University since 2007. Dr. Patty Solomon, associate
dean, School of Rehabilitation Science, and previous director of
PIPER and Dr. Bonny Jung, assistant professor, MScOT Program,
and current director of PIPER, bring rehabilitation sciences and
occupational therapy perspectives to this important work. The
overall goal of PIPER is to serve as an organizational structure
fostering a culture of interprofessional education (IPE) and inter-
professional collaboration (IPC) across all health sciences
programs, and to develop interprofessional curricular initiatives.
In the abstract for their submission, PIPER identified that
“[the] complexities of implementing a mandatory IPE curriculum
across diverse educational programs were significant.” PIPER has
forged working relationships between programs in the Faculty of
Health Sciences at McMaster encompassing over 4,000 students
from health professional training programs, including: nursing,
physiotherapy, occupational therapy, midwifery, physician assistant,
medicine, child life, and graduate studies.
The program team recognized the need to develop faculty skills
to design and facilitate IPE
and this led to the promotion
of widespread cultural change
among faculty, and subse-
quently, among learners.
Through PIPER, innova-
tive experiential learning op-
portunities for students have
been developed such as IP
Communications Skills Labs
and Team Observed Struc-
tured Clinical Encounters
(TOSCE’s) as formative and
summative learning tools. The program has also provided learning
opportunities for faculty members through IPE workshops and
DVD modular learning. In addition, the program fosters
student-led initiatives such as McMaster Interprofessional Student
Collaborative (MISC) and Training Residents to Evaluate and
Teach (TREaT). The development of new initiatives continues!
Our occupational therapy program faculty and students are
very proud of the members of PIPER for their innovative work and
now, recognition on a national stage! For full coverage of PIPER’s
work and The Alan BlizzardAward, please go to:
www.stlhe.ca/wp
-
content/uploads/2012/10/2012-ABA-Paper-Final.pdf
From left to right: Jenn Salfi, Josh Smalley, Beth Murray-Davis, Anne Mallott, Dyanne
Semogas, Bonny Jung, Alan Neville, Patty Solomon, Gillian Schaible, Carl DeLottinville
Inserts: Denise Marshall and Andrew Burke
If every OT practicing in Canada was
involved with one fieldwork placement each year,
we would have enough diverse and exciting
learning opportunities for all of our Canadian
OT students. Please contact your university’s
OT program and offer an OT student placement
in 2013!
EACH ONE,
TEACH ONE
Si chaque ergothérapeute pratiquant auCanada
s’impliquait en offrant un stage par année, nous
obtiendrions suffisamment d’opportunités d’ap-
prentissage diversifiées et stimulantes pour tous les
étudiants en ergothérapie au Canada. Nous vous
invitons à contacter votre programme universitaire
local pour offrir un stage à une étudiant en 2013 !
UN ERGOTHÉRAPEUTE,
UN STAGIAIRE
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