Developing Behavioral Health Programming in an Interprofessional Educational Setting

Behavioral Health is an underexplored opportunity for interprofessional student clinics and experiences. This is due to a number of reasons including the private nature of behavioral health sessions and lack of access to students who are in behavioral health programs. Incorporating social work students as leaders and providers of clinical interventions is often difficult in health systems that focus on prescribing as the main form of intervention for improving health outcomes. To address this gap, our team focused on identifying best practices for behavioral health interventions in an interdisciplinary/interprofessional setting.

The goal of our project was to develop a prospectus to identify 1) Feasibility of providing interprofessional health behavior interventions in an interdisciplinary clinic. 2) What types of interventions could be delivered in interprofessional environment. 3) Behavioral health needs of the clinics that Unity Clinic operates in. This presentation addresses the conference theme of "Preparing Students for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice" by illustrating our teams research into best practices on integrated behavioral health delivery in a transdisciplinary setting. Our goal was to prepare all health professions on our campus for collaborative best practice in areas like chronic pain and chronic illness management that share commonalities across specialties (both medical and behavioral health).

This seminar will focus on the results of our prospectus and utilize Kahoot! As a game-based active learning tool (polling/peer instruction). Participants will discuss as a group and identify areas of opportunity to include behavioral health into IPE instruction and student clinics. After our seminar, learners will be able to 1) Understand challenges of implementing behavioral health into student clinics 2) Identify gaps in the literature regarding behavioral health and IPE 3) Recognize options and opportunities for implementing behavioral health interventions into interprofessional student clinics.