Saint Mary’s Students Gather to Help “Jake”

Interprofessional Education (IPE) sits at the foundation of the College’s vision for the Center for Integrated Healthcare Education (CIHE). Saint Mary’s has a long, successful history of preparing students for careers in health and behavioral sciences—offering degrees in nursing, speech-language pathology, social work, autism studies, psychology, among other health sciences. In 2020, the College took a major step forward with the announcement of CIHE, a future hub where all Saint Mary’s health science and behavioral health programs will share space. The intention is to mirror the collaborative environments students in these programs will eventually enter.

 

A $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment launched the first phase of this work, transforming the first floor and lower level of Regina Hall into modern spaces for Nursing Sciences. Future development will bring Speech-Language Pathology, Social Work and Gerontology, and Autism Studies under the same roof. This shared approach reflects how healthcare functions today. As Director of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program, Cibele Webb, puts it, “No single profession can meet all the needs of individuals, families, or communities. Interprofessional education helps students learn how to work together to achieve better outcomes, preparing them to lead and innovate in their future fields.”

 

That reality took center stage on November 13, when the Interprofessional Education Committee, made up of faculty from varying departments across campus, hosted its third IPE event. Roughly 30 students from nursing, social work, education, psychology, and pre-physical and pre-occupational therapy tracks gathered for an evening designed to push them past the comfort of their own discipline. 

 

Students broke into their interprofessional groups. As students arrived and ate pizza, lively conversation echoed throughout Dalloway's Clubhouse. For a 6 o’clock program on a Thursday evening, the students’ passion and care for their disciplines outside of the classroom was almost tangible. 

Their mission centered on one hypothetical case: Jake, a 12-year-old patient recovering from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) needed a return-to-school plan. Lori Pajakowski and Christina Corso, both members of the Interprofessional Education Committee, framed the purpose of the event. Corso explained, “The primary goal of this tabletop exercise is for the students to work collaboratively to create a reintegration plan for the patient.” The prompts were clear, and students began by reviewing the case, while identifying what their specific discipline would bring to Jake’s recovery. From there, teams brainstormed the questions they might ask Jake and his family. This is where Pajakowski, Corso, and other faculty let their inner actors out, stepping into the roles of Jake, mother, father, and sister.

 

The student teams navigated real-time communication. Every student who raised their hand asked well-informed and thoughtful questions of Jake and his family. 

 

Gathering what they learned from the interviews, the teams transitioned into building the reintegration plan. Each group made recommendations for Jake’s academic environment and daily routines, as well as suggestions for maintaining healthy relationships with friends, and his broader reintegration into school life. The night wrapped with a faculty-facilitated debrief for students to examine how their teamwork unfolded; the variety of academic backgrounds at each table proved to be invaluable.

 

This kind of work reflects a larger shift in healthcare education. Corso noted, “As simply stated by the World Health Organization: ‘Those who work together should learn together.’ Interprofessional Collaboration and Education have been goals of healthcare organizations since 2010 to better improve communication and collaboration of a team approach to meeting important patient outcomes. A collaborative approach, bringing expertise from individual professions, has been shown to improve outcomes and decrease adverse events.”

 

Corso and Pajakowski emphasized why Saint Mary’s intentionally widened participation beyond traditional clinical fields, saying “At Saint Mary’s, we have identified the value of adding education and psychology students to these events to allow our students in our healthcare programs to understand what each of them brings to the table in meeting individual patient or population health outcomes.” Including these students pushes teams to think past acute care and into daily life, development, and long-term reintegration—exactly the areas Jake’s case demanded they understand.

 

This IPE event embodied what CIHE will continue to make possible: students across disciplines learning side by side, solving problems together, and experiencing firsthand the reality that collaboration brings to the table.

 

The night’s lively conversations, thoughtful answers, and shared problem-solving captured the future Saint Mary’s is building toward: a place where students who work together can learn together. 

 

November 21, 2025