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In May, St. ��������’s Institute of Simulation and Interprofessional Learning (I-SAIL) hosted the 2024 Midwest Interprofessional Conference, drawing attendees from around the Midwest and showcasing the program’s leadership in the region. The conference offered attendees a chance to connect with other professionals and learn about developments and best practices in interprofessional healthcare education, simulation-enhanced interprofessional learning, and interprofessional healthcare practice. 

Attendees came from six states across the Midwest, representing at least 49 different organizations, and included healthcare educators, faculty, managers, administrators, and students. Ahead of the conference, I-SAIL hosted a Simulation Summit Pre-Conference with the goal of collaborating with regional experts to discuss challenges and create solutions specific to healthcare simulation.

The conference opened with a welcome and an address from keynote speaker Kellie Dionne Bryant, DNP, director of the Center for Innovation in Education Excellence at the National League for Nursing. Guests then took part in breakout sessions and learned from posters and vendors onsite. 

Several St. Kate’s students and faculty members presented posters on research topics, including SMMART Clinic, KARE program and student mentorship, and simulation and interprofessional education outcomes from University learning activities. 

Stephanie de Sam Lazaro ’05, MAOT’06, OTD’14, associate professor and interprofessional learning director for I-SAIL, and Krista Anderson DNP’24, simulation director, discussed the formation of I-SAIL and the evaluation of IPE outcomes during a workshop they led. Other nursing and respiratory care faculty presented on a panel about fetal loss and led a platform session on facilitating complex simulations. 

“The simulation summit was a really good opportunity for those of us who are simulation educators to collaborate and talk about what the newest and best practices are in simulation and to spur ideas,” said de Sam Lazaro. “It was a ‘world cafe’ format, so they were spending time sharing ideas, sharing knowledge, and moving that forward. I really hope out of that came some opportunities for collaboration across institutions, as well as ideas for collaboration within institutions.”

This conference was not St. Kate’s first foray into hosting an IPE conference — the University previously hosted an annual interprofessional, education-focused conference in the late 2010s, but it was paused for several years. Once I-SAIL was created in 2022, merging St. Kate’s interprofessional and simulation departments, the team began exploring options to bring back the conference. To be inclusive of the I-SAIL department’s dual focuses, they kept the event centered on interprofessional education and extended it to include the value of healthcare simulation as an interprofessional education learning approach. 

Thanks to the existence of I-SAIL and the range of programs offered, St. Kate’s is especially primed to host an event like this. 

“I think one thing that’s unique to St. Kate’s with interprofessional education is that we have such a breadth of different healthcare programs here,” de Sam Lazaro said. “We’re running simulations with radiography and sonography and nursing, or respiratory care and radiography and PA and nursing, all at the same time. So we have a lot of simulations that are across the board, all the way from the associate level to graduate level students in the same scenario.” 

Following this year’s success, I-SAIL plans to host the conference again next year. “I really hope folks came away from this with new ideas to continue to grow best practices in their interprofessional pedagogy and build collaborations, and want to come back next year,” said de Sam Lazaro. “We’re hoping that this will continue to bring awareness to what St. Kate’s is doing, and be a place to host folks to have these conversations and to learn.” 

Photos by Patrick Clancy and Rebecca Zenefski Slater ’10 / By Rebecca Studios