Becoming a trustworthy professional partner

We talk a lot about massage therapy becoming a mainstream healthcare profession. How do we make that actually happen?

Two crucial components of trust are competence and integrity. Our potential clients and healthcare professional colleagues need two things from us: they have to be able to trust that we are able to deliver safe and effective healthcare competently, and they have to be able to trust that our words are true, and that they match our actions.

A great deal of the focus of this POEM reboot will be interprofessional education, because that's a huge need in the current massage education landscape. We'll talk about competence soon; here, we'll talk about integrity and caring about what our partners care about.

Being a good partner means genuinely caring about what our partners care about, and integrity means that we don't just give lip service to that caring--we care in reality, and our actions are consistent with that caring.

What do our partners care about? Mainstream healthcare professionals have identified areas where they consider interprofessional education to be especially important. (All of these organizations are in the US context, because that's what I am most familiar with--I welcome comparison and contrast in a discussion about how these issues are thought about on an international level.)

The Institute of Medicine has identified six areas of healthcare quality that a healthcare system should aim for:

• Safe: Avoiding harm to patients from the care that is intended to help them. 

• Effective: Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and misuse, respectively). 

• Patient-centered: Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions. 

• Timely: Reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care. 

• Efficient: Avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and effort. 

• Equitable: Providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status. 

To support these aims, the IOM proposes the following interprofessional core competencies, spelled out in Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality.

Chapter 3 The Core Competencies Needed for Health Care Professionals 

All health professionals should be educated to deliver patient-centered care as members of an interdisciplinary team, emphasizing evidence-based practice, quality improvement approaches, and informatics. 

To this end, the committee proposes a set of simple, core competencies that all health clinicians should possess, regardless of their discipline, to meet the needs of the 21st-century health care system: 

• Provide patient-centered care—identify, respect, and care about patients’ differences, values, preferences, and expressed needs; relieve pain and suffering; coordinate continuous care; listen to, clearly inform, communicate with, and educate patients; share decision making and management; and continuously advocate disease prevention, wellness, and promotion of healthy lifestyles, including a focus on population health. 

• Work in interdisciplinary teams—cooperate, collaborate, communicate, and integrate care in teams to ensure that care is continuous and reliable. 

• Employ evidence-based practice—integrate best research with clinical expertise and patient values for optimum care, and participate in learning and research activities to the extent feasible. 

• Apply quality improvement—identify errors and hazards in care; understand and implement basic safety design principles, such as standardization and simplification; continually understand and measure quality of care in terms of structure, process, and outcomes in relation to patient and community needs; design and test interventions to change processes and systems of care, with the objective of improving quality. 

• Utilize informatics—communicate, manage knowledge, mitigate error, and support decision making using information technology.

Similarly, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has identified six milestone-based competencies to evaluate physicians in training. Although they slice up the conceptual pie slightly differently than the IOM does, you can see how much the sets of competencies have in common with each other.

Patient Care 

Residents must be able to provide patient care that is compassionate, appropriate, and effective for the treatment of health problems and the promotion of health. 

Medical Knowledge 

Residents must be able to demonstrate knowledge about established and evolving biomedical, clinical, and cognate (e.g. epidemiological and social-behavioral) sciences and the application of this knowledge to patient care. 

Practice-Based Learning and Improvement 

Residents must be able to investigate and evaluate their patient care practices, appraise and assimilate scientific evidence, and improve their patient care practices. 

Interpersonal and Communication Skills 

Residents must be able to demonstrate interpersonal and communication skills that result in effective information exchange and teaming with patients, patients’ families, and professional associates. 

Professionalism 

Residents must be able to demonstrate a commitment to carrying out professional responsibilities, adherence to ethical principles, and sensitivity to a diverse patient population. 

Systems-Based Practice 

Residents must be able to demonstrate an awareness of and responsiveness to the larger context and system of health care and the ability to effectively call on system resources to provide care that is of optimal value.

The professional partners whom we say we want to be teammates with have made it very clear what they care about, for the benefit of providing the best care possible for their patients.

Providing resources for building these interprofessional competencies inside MT is one focus here at POEM. To make it easier to navigate the resources, each of these competencies will have a label associated with it. You can click the appropriate label to bring up all the posts associated with a particular competency topic.

Genuinely caring about developing these interprofessional competencies, and making sure that we walk the talk with integrity--that's up to all of us, every day.