King's College London

Colin Butchers and Dr Mary Raleigh of the GKT School of Medical Education and Department of Adult Nursing, respectively, and their interprofessional education (IPE) initiative 'Recognition of an Unwell Patient' have been nominated for two awards: a King's Award in the category of Excellence in Innovation and Impact and a KHP Education Academy Award in the category of Multiprofessional Learning. Together they led on a project to design and implement an interdisciplinary session for first year medicine and first year adult and mental heath nursing students.

For the 2018-19 academic year, an existing medical curriculum clinical simulation session in which students work in small groups around a bed was adapted to become interdisciplinary. The new session remained focused on students collaborating and using common skills of clinical patient assessment, communication and decision making whilst innovating by utilising the affordances IPE allows. Students of each discipline learn with, from and about each other simultaneously to learning about their own disciplines aspects of patient care. They work in pairs to clinically assess, handover and treat their simulated patient and work together to observe and provide feedback using a collaborative practice framework. At the end of the session students are given a task to clinically prioritise the patients they have seen and undergo a debrief.

Recognition of an Unwell Patient's process of design and implementation was rigorously researched, piloted and evaluated before its implementation into the joint medicine and nursing curricula for the 2019-20 academic year. Significant contributors to this project were Dr J. Seale and Mrs N. Purkiss Bejarano.