Dave Plough
I have to put on my radio face or something.

Barbara Maxwell
Ha ha ha!

Dave Plough
Alright, welcome to Collaborative Conversations. I am Dave Plough, one of your co-hosts, and I am joined by the IU IPE Center's Director, Dr. Barbara Maxwell. Hey, so this podcast is made especially for and about interprofessional practice in education, and the goal of it is to be the follow -up to our elevator pitch, essentially. If you've talked to us, any member of our team,

Barbara Maxwell
Hi there.

Dave Plough
We're hopeful that you've decided that you want to hear more about us and then that you've come here, but we're not just covering our department and what we do. We're wanting to cover interprofessional practice as a whole, interprofessional education as a whole. At least that's my goal. Is that your goal also here, Barbara?

Barbara Maxwell
It is indeed. I think a lot of people are looking for examples or want to talk to others about what they're doing. Our work is so diverse depending where we're doing it and we're hoping some of the lessons we've learned as we've been working on interprofessional learning and collaborative practice actually carry over to other people. So we're sharing it with the best intent of letting people have a little glimpse about what we're doing and hoping that it helps them on their interprofessional journey.

Dave Plough
Yeah, and this podcast is a little bit unique, not just in subject matter, but also in the way that we're handling things. So while Barbara and I, this is the first episode, we're here as your host, and we're going to be your host every episode, but we're not necessarily handling the bulk of the episode. After the two of us do our little introductions, talk about, introduce everybody, what's to come.

We're going to step out most of the time, not today, but most of the time we're going to step out and then you're going to hear from other people who also work in this industry. Is industry the right term to use here?

Barbara Maxwell
Yes, well, maybe more in this world or this agenda that we're driving. So we're trying to change people's behaviour. So maybe a word that relates more to behaviour. I don't often think of industry as a behaviour word.

Dave Plough
Yeah, me neither. So, okay, well, you know, we learned something there, right? We keep talking, we keep learning. So, today, we're actually going to, I said, most times we won't be speaking with Barbara or myself, but today we actually are.

Barbara Maxwell
Yeah, I heard you say that and I thought to myself, today that's different.

Dave Plough
Yep, so it is a little bit different. You're going to be speaking with the deputy director of our department, Jennifer Burba, and what are we covering today?

Barbara Maxwell
So Jennifer and I have been, really thinking it would be helpful to people to share a little bit about the center, what we do, and more importantly, why we do it and why we do it the way that we do it. So today, Jennifer and I are going to be talking about the center, kind of how it evolved, how it began and how it's changed over time. Because I think a lot of people are in this situation where maybe they're at the beginning and they haven't got a center yet and they're thinking about designing one. So we're hoping it might give you a little bit of insight there of how things happened here. And the other flip side of it is if you have a centre, you might be in the same situation that we were in as I stepped into the centre. It had been running for some time and we started looking at it and trying to think about, well, what should we be doing and what should the future look like?

Like for us and so we're committed to collaborating to improve the lives of people and populations so what does that look like? So Jennifer and I are going to talk how the centre started but also the agenda, how it shifted as we changed our thoughts about what it is we're actually here to do and why it matters.

Dave Plough
Great. And with that, let's go ahead and we will begin the interview with you and Jennifer Burba.

Jennifer Burba
The center's about a decade old, so 2014. However, we actually started way before then in planning interprofessional education at IU. In fact, about 2010, our president of our university, Michael McRobbie, formed a committee of individuals who come from the different schools, so the deans of the different schools, to form the University Clinical Affairs
committee.

These deans represented eight health and social public health areas, including dentistry, health and human sciences, medicine, nursing, optometry, again, the two public health programs, one in Indianapolis and one in Bloomington, and then also our social work school. And this committee has been chaired by Dean Jay Hess since its inception.

The next year, so about 2011, the UCA, the University Clinical Affairs Committee, appointed individuals from their respective schools to develop a vision statement, some guiding principles or values, and some key considerations for implementation of interprofessional education at IU.

After reporting the developments to the UCA committee, this IPE Steering Committee sought and received adoption from the Board of Trustees for Interprofessional Education Vision at Indiana University. And that was about spring of 2012.

That summer, IU hosted a three -day training workshop led by the premier interprofessional programming experts at the University of Toronto.

As a result of this training, it was suggested that Indiana University create an Interprofessional Education Center. That's what brings us to 2014 and the establishment of who we are today, the Indiana University Interprofessional Practice and Education Center. And our charge was to extend a culture of collaboration across the state and build a stronger and better healthcare teams for the future.

By fall of 2015, the first of many interprofessional education events were hosted. In 2016, in fact, the first event for the interprofessional curriculum was rolled out.

That curriculum called Team Education Advancing Collaboration in Health Care or TEACH was IU's first official interprofessional curriculum and the beginning for health, social, and public health students to begin learning about, from, and with each other. So that's where we started. Barbara, can you talk about is it the same now? If it isn't, how is it different?

Barbara Maxwell
Yeah, and that's it's great to have a historian in the center who knows how the center formed and has been here at Indiana University for such a long time because you get such valuable information from your historians. So when I stepped in in the end of 2021 as the director of the center, it didn't quite look the same as Jennifer said, how it began at the beginning.

The center has a robust team and has had that 10 years or more of experience of delivering curricula to the students. So as I stepped in as the new executive director, I was tasked with, by the University Clinical Affairs, Jennifer, that you mentioned, I report to them and they tasked me with eight particular key objectives that they hoped our center would be able to move forward on. And so,

I brought those eight objectives to our team right at the beginning to say, this is what the University Clinical Affairs expect us to do now. And so we started to look at these objectives together to really try to plan our future as a center. And Jennifer knows this really well that I absolutely truly believe, and they have to listen to me say this all the time, don't you? That if we expect our key stakeholders to engage in collaborative behaviors. That's what our expectation is. We need to live those. We need to exemplify the behaviors that we're asking them to do ourselves. So as a team, we need to live what it is that we expect others to do. So we started using a shared leadership approach, having conversations together as a team about what it is that the center did, so what do we do? What could we do? What are their ideas about where we might go in the future? What's the capacity for us to grow or to try new things? And really out of that, what should we do? So what's our next direction? What should we do together? And so we were really gathering together the ideas of what everyone had for what the Centre could achieve, particularly for what the purpose of the Centre is.

Jennifer Burba
So, Barbara you mentioned the shared leadership approach. Can you talk about that a little bit more? How does that help us move forward as a center?

Barbara Maxwell
So, as I said, we had these eight key objectives that we were tasked with delivering together as a centre. And so through our work together, we were able to start really getting to the heart of what was our reason for being as a centre? What were we actually intended to do? And we realised that the end goal of absolutely everything that we were doing in the centre was to improve the lives of people and populations. That's the work that we do downstream will improve the lives of people and populations. And so that's how we came up with what our vision was, that really we were all about building these collaborative knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours to improve the lives of people and populations. And we also realised, well, how do we do that? And it was in one of our team meetings that...

Collectively, we came up with this idea that, well, what we've got to do is change a culture. We've got to build a culture of collaboration. So with that in mind, that notion that if we're going to ask other people to engage in collaborative behaviors and effective interprofessional work and collaboration, we have to do that too. So we started using a shared leadership process to do that.

Jennifer Burba
Yeah, you're exactly right. And this is something that I have reiterated to the team multiple times. If we don't show it, if we don't do it ourselves, why should

Barbara Maxwell
Yeah, so if we don't live it, how can we expect others to? I always say that people can sniff out a fake. When things are not real, when they see you saying that you need to engage in these types of behaviors, but you're not doing it yourself, it can actually cause the opposite effect of what you're trying to do. You're trying to get people to develop attitudes that they're gonna buy into these behaviors. but when you're not exemplifying them, when you're not showcasing those behaviors, it can actually have the opposite effect and it can turn them off, the very behaviors you're trying to encourage them to really does matter. And the shared leadership process that we're using is actually helping us create that type of environment, create those types of behaviors in ourselves as a team. And so it's really about creating a psychologically safe, environment, a place where people can share ideas, they feel that they're comfortable to say when things aren't working, you know, sometimes you get things wrong. They can come up with alternatives, suggestions, alternative ideas for what we can do. We can make mistakes. That's normal. We normally do make mistakes in what we're trying to do. And we can learn from those mistakes together. And that as we build, we build together.

That's been a really important part of how we've the centre and the work of the centres that we do it together. So everybody, and I mean everybody, that's the lovely thing about it. Everybody on the team has a stake in what we're doing. Everybody knows every part and they know the reason why things look the way they look and operate the way that they operate. You know, and that means that if a piece of the puzzle goes awry, if things don't work out the way we expect, everybody knows how to step in in that moment.

So it generates a lot of really intuitive backup behavior for each other, a mutual performance monitoring. And so we have shared goals and it's really that we're trying to really showcase and role model Eduardo Salas's big five of highly effective teams. You know, we get to that through this shared leadership process where we all have a stake in all of it.
And so everybody's part, every contribution to the team is seen as being really valuable and everybody's opinion is sought. And we've learned from really surprising moments and statements that people have shared with us during leadership approach, you know, something that someone says, it just stops us in our tracks. We think we've got a way forward and then up comes a new idea and we're shifted and we're going in a really different direction. So Jennifer, in one of our meetings, you went to the board. We were talking about the normal conversation that people have and this is the order they say it in. What's the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours that we need our students to engage in? And right in that moment, you walked up to the board and you wrote on the board attitude, drew a little arrow across and wrote behaviour.

And you said, surely, knowledge and skills are great, but if people don't have the attitude that this is important, why the heck are they gonna engage in these behaviors? So we need to go back a step. We need to create these attitudes, and from these attitudes, we might be likely to lead to the behavior. And that, as you know, has transformed our curriculum. I call it the Burba model because you wrote it on the board and everything that happened with us with our Why It Matters, our voices of IPE, making sure that students and learners are hearing from real people that this has an impact on, came from that. Dave, our communications manager, shared the idea of a hero story with us one week.

And that led us to really, really effective storyboarding of our curriculum and of our curricular concepts. And Jinae one of our program coordinators, talked about, well, really what we're trying to do is create a backpack, a backpack full of resources that these new clinicians from healthcare, from social work and from public health can step into their world of work and have all those resources ready to use them when they need them. And Cathy, our executive assistant in the centre, always bringing us back to a focus on process, clarity. So when we would get too complex, because after all, we're academics, a lot of us, and that leads us to over -talk and over -think and over -do, just reminding us that we've got to articulate what we're doing to other people in a way that really makes sense. And so that bringing us back to how do we make this a message and talk about it in a way that makes sense to all of our key stakeholders, those are the moments when we really were listening to each other, where we really trust each other, trust the ideas that we're bringing to the table. And when we become really happy to go in a different direction.

Jennifer Burba
Yeah, absolutely. And that process, that shared leadership process really brought us to where we are now with our five priority areas. So you had eight areas that you need to cover. We condensed that to five priority areas for the center that were important to us and what we were doing, but also in the interprofessional world. So those are like the future workforce, the current workforce and workplace, community, advocacy, and building and sharing that expertise that we now.

Barbara Maxwell
Yeah, and think about the difference that makes for people engaging in their work. So when you engage in work that you've actually built the direction that it's going to go, this is our shared vision, our shared mission forward. These are our shared initiatives and things that we thought wouldn't it be great if the centre could actually move into this space, do this type of work. And so our priority for the...

Future workforce is really all about, yes, we've got to prepare the next generation of collaborative practitioners, but we've also got to deal with the current workforce and the actual places where they work by building and strengthening interprofessional and agency collaboration in those spaces. Because the next generation of providers only accounts for about 3 % of the workforce. And think about it, they step into the workforce with very little power and authority.

So we can't ask them to change the world that many of us who've been in the health and social care and public health environments for a long time that we kind of haven't been able to fix ourselves in decades. We can't expect them to do that. So we need to focus on the current workforce and workplace. And because we have learners in our programs who are from health, from social work and from public health.

It means that we also have to step into the community, into the places and spaces where they work. So we have to really think about how can we build really effective interprofessional and interagency community partnerships that are likely to help improve the health and wellbeing of the people and populations as a whole, but also the people and population who live in Indiana, which is a focus of the university.

And to do that, we also have to do our strategic priority number four, which is address advocacy. So we really need to advocate for system level changes, both in the education side and in the clinical side that will help sustain those interprofessional and interagency collaborations. Because we know the system doesn't necessarily make it easy to do, which is why those of us who have been in this system for a long time have struggled.

And our strategic priority is really recognizing that we want to share and build our expertise, expertise on the design, for example, delivery and evaluation of effective interprofessional, evidence -based interprofessional learning and evidence -based collaborative practice, team working in different workplaces and work settings, and that there's a unique expertise to this work that we as a centre have and host? Why keep it to ourselves? You know, the notion is we need to push this site and we need to share it with others. So we've been doing consultancy work. We've been helping other universities build their ideas about what their plan might look like. We've been sharing it internally with our faculty. We've been putting that evidence and that pedagogical knowledge into the design of our curriculum.

And we are sharing those methods and approaches that we've used for our curriculum to make it evidence -based with others through publications, presentations, and sharing that work. And we've been helping faculty from our partnering programs to put their interprofessional work out into the scholarly world through publications and presentations. So there's some of the things that are really important about sharing that expertise.

So as we kind of think about it, there are five priority areas. So what we do as a center is we work on those. We build, we see how we're doing, but we've made great headway on those five things already in a very short time. And I would attribute that to the fact that we're doing that collectively. We're doing that as a highly effective team.

And we're doing it through a shared leadership process where every single voice matters and we listen and respect to those voices. And when we have great ideas from unique people and individuals who suddenly just say the right thing at the right time, it takes us at amazing places. And that's a showcasing, I hope, that we live what it is that we teach.

Dave Plough
Alright, so that's it for your interview Jennifer Burba, but that is just the first of two that you did with her, correct?

Barbara Maxwell
Yes, yes, so the first is about the center, but we have another conversation about our curriculum and how we move from a traditional curriculum to a competency -based curriculum. And I think a lot of people are in that space right now with their own professional program. So I think that's going to be an interesting kind of lesson for to see how you do that with an interprofessional program.

Dave Plough
Yeah, that's great. It's a really good conversation. I asked you like I didn't know but I was the producer on the episode So I sat through the entire interview. Since we're wrapping up, I want to point out that this is just the first episode and we're releasing all these at once. So, if you want to download this episode or watch just this episode, that's great It's available But so are the other four episodes that we've done in this first batch and you can find those
at our website, ipe .iu .edu, or you can find them wherever you came across this, whether that be Spotify or some other podcast platform. So we are available everywhere. And that's it for us. Is there anything you want to say as we sign off, Barbara?

Barbara Maxwell
I’m hoping that people get something good out of the session today and that they're wanting to come back and have more. And if you've got ideas for things that you might want us to have conversations about then we're more than happy to kind of take some suggestions too.

Dave Plough
All right. And with that, we will catch you next time on Collaborative Conversations.