INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAMS

The AHEC Team integrates health care learners from a variety of disciplines into a high performance team that focuses on one primary care issue in manner that positively affects the health of their project's community. The interdisciplinary group of students and graduates will learn advanced team skills and practical applications of community health, in addition to the clinical skills applicable to their "rotation."

Team members/learners include a Primary Care resident, an allopathic or osteopathic medical student, an MSN (nursing masters) candidate, a PharmD (pharmacy) candidate, an MPH (public health) student, a dental resident, an allied health student, and possibly other health professions students.

Each candidate is recruited from the participating WV AHEC primary care residency program, WVRHEP, and other appropriate health professions disciplines.

AHEC Team members are considered advanced learners, and are expected to achieve a level of performance that will differentiate themselves from non-AHEC learners. Appropriate "pre-AHEC" threshold skills will be determined for each team member.

The team must then assess its objective, educate the patients and the professionals to it, identify solutions and, ultimately, impact the community by diminishing or eliminating that particular health problem.

The actual job description will be a set of performance-based expectations for what each learner will achieve (i.e. competencies or skills) after successfully completing an AHEC experience. These competencies will reflect the 1999 Pew Health Professions Commission "Twenty-One Competencies for the Twenty-First Century."

The AHEC Team is a special, permanent ad hoc AHEC Committee. Although individual learners will come and go, Interdisciplinary AHEC Teams will be permanent fixtures of our regional AHEC centers.

Many projects will be carried forward by future teams, each one building on the last team's efforts and creating new solutions for community health problems. AHEC Team members will be able to look back on the fruits of their collective labor, as well as their individual accomplishments.