Intraprofessional nursing students coming together through an academic interprofessional practice partnership experience: Are you a caregiver?

An urgent need exists for collaborative intraprofessional clinical and scholarship experiences for DNP and PhD students that allow them to participate in creating unique transferable projects with the potential to improve health for all in our communities. We discussed at a 2018 nursing salon the myriad of informal caregivers who assist with ADLs and/or healthcare management of older adults living at home. Many of these caregivers go unrecognized and may benefit from available community supports to assist them as caregivers. Thus, working with our community experts in geriatrics and case management, home healthcare providers, and nursing faculty, we developed the Are You a Caregiver? Initiative. The purpose was to better identify older adult's informal caregivers and make them aware of available resources in our local community. Our students developed, based on their review of the literature, a combined descriptive caregiver task identifier and community resource infographic. They disseminated it with targeted clinical distribution, and they participated in publishing it on eScholarship. The students participated in identifying and adding to our diverse health care team who reflect our communities served. The next step will be student-led key informant interviews on adapting the infographic to identify/serve hard-to-reach caregivers (immigrant, minority, and/or LGBTQIA+ caregivers). All these clinical and scholarship experiences provided our students with collaborative action-oriented deliverables (including writing for dissemination vs. for presentation only) they can expand on in the future, while experiencing and understanding the unique roles we each play in the creation of interprofessional projects.& COPY; 2023 Organization for Associate Degree Nursing. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.