VA’s interprofessional training program improves quality of primary care

WASHINGTON — The Veterans Health Administration is providing interprofessional training to health care providers to improve the quality of primary care in the U.S., according to a speaker at the Primary Care Collaborative annual meeting.

The meeting focused on recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report on rebuilding primary care. One of these recommendations is to “train primary care teams where people live and work.”

This recommendation aligns with efforts by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Traci Solt, DNP, the director for clinical services at the VHA’s National Office of Primary Care, said during the meeting. Solt joined Leanne Chrisman-Khawam, MD, MEd, the program director of the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, and others during a panel discussion to highlight training programs and the importance of interprofessional education.

“It’s bizarre to me that we want this really functional interprofessional team, but we really train in silos,” Chrisman-Khawam said. “Even so many of the innovative teams, we still send them off to their [specialty] school. We wanted to rethink that.”

Veterans Affairs (VA) has a lengthy history of health care provider training. According to Solt, about 70% of physicians in the U.S. had some training in the department, and the VA trains around 113,000 health care professionals annually.

In 2010, the VA adopted the Patient-aligned Care Team (PACT) model, which is its own version of the patient-centered medical home model. The department then created a training program to educate providers about the patient-centered medical home model and how to be part of an interprofessional team.

Solt highlighted several positive outcomes that were the result of the training program, which includes:

• improvement in staff satisfaction, with 69% of trainees believing they had more job satisfaction after participating in the program;
• improvement in training satisfaction, with trainees believing the program provided them with skills that “made them better health care providers”; and
• improvements in the quality of chronic disease management, including HbA1c levels and renal testing.

“There were more timely mental health referrals, and decrease in ED and related hospitalizations,” Solt said.

Chrisman-Khawam said the “complexity” of primary care makes it ideal for interprofessional training.

“It really is about working together. It’s about relationships,” she said.

References:

• Chrisman-Khawam L, et al. Primary care teams: Training them where they work and live. Presented at: Primary Care Collaborative Annual Conference; Dec. 14-15, 2022; Washington.
• Implementing high-quality primary care: Rebuilding the foundation of health care. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25983/chapter/1. Accessed Dec. 15, 2022.