UB faculty members and Western New York BloodCare staff have received an Interprofessional Education Collaboration Honorable Mention Award recognizing their collaborative teamwork and impact on improved community outcomes on bleeding and clotting disorder education.

The award was presented last month at the annual meeting of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative and the PHS Commissioned Officers Foundation for the Advancement of Public Health.

The collaboration began in 2021 when WNY BloodCare reached out to UB to work together to build a program that would educate health profession students about bleeding and clotting disorders. With 1% of the population being diagnosed with hemophilia or Von Willebrand disease and very little training provided in most health professions education, it made sense for these two groups to work together.

“Working with WNY BloodCare has allowed students to learn more about the impact of social determinants of health on well-being, interprofessional collaboration, and learn about bleeding and clotting disorders,” says Jessica Kruger, clinical associate professor in the School of Public Health and Health Professions and one of the leaders of the collaboration.

Working with Kruger were Jessica Wulf, chief operating officer at WNY BloodCare; Catherine M. Mann, clinical professor in the School of Nursing; and Beverly A. Schaefer, clinical assistant professor in Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Through the partnership, the two groups implemented three different learning opportunities for UB students in the health professions:

• WNY BloodCare Interprofessional Student Team Experiential Rotations (WISTER) provides UB health professions students with clinical exposure to individuals with bleeding and clotting disorders, and exposure to a highly functioning interprofessional health care team.
• WNY BloodCare Health Mentors Program enhances workforce development in the area of bleeding and clothing disorders. In this semester-long program, 25 students are divided into interprofessional teams of four to five students with patients from WNY BloodCare serving as mentors who educate the students about their lived experience with a chronic health condition.
• WNY BloodCare Innovation Sprints provides UB students with creative, implementable solutions for a problem posed by WNY BloodCare by engaging interprofessional teams of UB health professions students. Innovation Sprints are inclusive events where student participants develop solutions to challenges faced by organizations.

“The WNY BloodCare team is an interprofessional team that supports holistic health for people with bleeding and clotting disorders; they provide a vision of what interprofessional collaborative practice looks like in the field,” Kruger says.