It is no secret that interdisciplinary collaboration and healthcare teams are essential to providing quality patient care. Therefore, it is important to begin learning how to collaborate with all members of the healthcare team during medical training. While the idea of interdisciplinary collaboration is already reflected in the design of the Health Sciences Education Building, I feel that The Differential should also be a reflection of interdisciplinary collaboration [1]. The solution to this was to create an interdisciplinary section of The Differential.
This interdisciplinary section will reflect the idea from a recent study that as we begin to interact with other healthcare providers, we change the way we view our own professional identification [2]. This study comments that, “each transitional stage [of professional identity development] creates insecurity as students struggle with understanding the prospect of a new interprofessional identity.” Collaboration through a student publication is one of the many ways we can learn to be successful members of a medical team.
The chance to learn to be a collaborative member of a healthcare team through reading and sharing the work of other health professions students is exciting not only to me, but also the rest of The Differential editing team. We are excited to launch this new section of The Differential, and we look forward to collaboration with NAU College of Health and Human Services students, UA College of Pharmacy students, and UA Public Health students!
Cynthia L. Stull & Christine M. Blue (2016) Examining the influence of professional identity formation on the attitudes of students towards interprofessional collaboration, Journal of Interprofessional Care, 30:1, 90-96, DOI: 10.3109/13561820.2015.1066318
http://phoenixmed.arizona.edu/campus/hseb/innovative-building
Madalyn Nelson is part of the 2020 class at The University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix. She is an Arizona native and graduated from Xavier University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in biology. Madalyn has a passion for traveling and global health. To contact Madalyn, please email her at madalyndnelson[at]email.arizona.edu.