Building the Future of Team-Based Care: Inside UBC's Gateway Clinic

Thanks for the question, Lisa.

Um, Gateway was intentionally built for learners as a place where, you know, we can incorporate patient care, team-based practice, uh, whole system quality, scholarship, and, um, and health professions education.

It's integrated, and it's an important milestone for BC because primary care is changing, and we understand that patients increasingly need that coordinated, accessible care that's supported by a team.

But at the same time, learners don't always have the opportunity to practice that kind of collaboration, and so we see Gateway as a real opportunity to support, uh, learners to do that.

Okay, so the clinic brings together learners from nine different health professions, if I have that right.

Why is it so important for students to learn with, from, and about one another in a real clinical environment rather than solely in a classroom setting?

Yeah, thanks, Lisa.

Um, w- this is kind of the impetus of the Gateway Clinic is that it is learner-centered and a teaching clinic first and foremost.

Our learners are our first customer, and then our patients are our second customer, so we purposely built it that way.

And it's built on the premise that, you know, classroom learning is really important in... as we learn our different health professions, but it doesn't replicate the complexity of working in a clinical setting.

And so this is what is really important, is that learners have experience to what it actually means to work in a clinical setting.

This is with the learning they take out and will use when they become their own clinicians and practitioners.

When the learners are in the setting at Gateway, they will see how the different professions think, how they communicate, how they prioritize, and how they contribute to care decisions together.

So when learners work with each other, when they learn from each other, and when they learn about each other, they begin to understand their scope of practice in a much more fulsome way and in a much more practical way.

They get to learn who's involved, how to involve them, when to involve them, and how to communicate across disciplines.

They also begin to appreciate that good care is not just about one provider having all the answers.

It's about the team bringing different expertises together around the patient goals.

That's fantastic.

So really what I'm hearing is scaffolding that learning experience from the classroom into the clinical setting and, um, and finding time to connect, to debrief as well, I'm sure.

Is that, uh, part of the experience through those, uh, connecting points?

Very much so.

Uh, the, you know, the research shows that when we provide space for the learners to actually learn together and reflect upon the experiences in the workplace, they actually learn a lot better around what their scope is, but also what the other scopes are and how to integrate those to help fill in those gaps that can happen in healthcare when we don't understand the different professions that we're working alongside.