From clinician to automotive marketing to professor, the broad experience of Amber Fitzsimmons, PT, MS, DPTSc, demonstrates the diversity that interprofessional education (IPE) at UC San Francisco aims to exemplify.
An assistant professor with joint appointments in the School of Medicine’s Department of Anatomy and the Department of Physical Therapy (PT) and Rehabilitation Science, Dr. Fitzsimmons serves as the PT lead in the IPE program at UCSF. The UCSF Program for IPE (PIPE) was created to enable students from different fields to interact and learn in a way that prepares them for the seamless teamwork of interprofessional collaborative practice that successful modern patient care delivery requires.
“The goal is to learn about and from each
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CD has sixteen members from all schools and discovers IPE curriculum delivery opportunities. Fitzsimmons represents PT on the CD committee. The Assessment Committee has five members and assembles the IPE framework and ensures that outcome goals are met. The third committee, Faculty Development and Scholarship, has two members: JoAnne Saxe, RN, FAAN, Community Health Systems, who is part of the Academy of Medical Educators (AME) and Research and Development Medical Education and assists with IPE faculty development; and Shelley Adler, PhD, Family & Community Medicine, who develops scholarship plans for research and …show more content…
Fitzsimmons involvement with IPE includes both national and international commitments.
National Level Involvement
At the national level, she: is a member of CDWG, is on a grant review committee, a faculty lead for the Interprofessional Standardized Patient Experience Committee (ISPE), is a recipient of innovation grants, attends retreats, and teaches.
First, on CDWG, she represents the PT department for interprofessional curriculum at the university and attends monthly meetings. On ISPE, she helps design third-year stimulation period cases for students in different schools and attends quarterly meetings.
Second, Fitzsimmons is a recipient of two innovation grants. The first was used during the 2014-2015 academic year for interprofessional quality improvement through a patient safety project that brought PT and Pharmacy students together. They worked on an aggregated database that assessed falls that took place in UCSF medical buildings. The collaboration was created in order to predict future falls and teach students the importance of interprofessional