Dora Mills’ editorial on UNE’s interprofessional training efforts published in ‘Sun Journal’
On April 19, 2015, the Sun Journal published an editorial by Dora Anne Mills, M.D., M.P.H., FAAP, vice president for Clinical Affairs, urging readers to be proactive about protecting themselves from medical errors in health care settings and discussing UNE’s efforts to bolster interprofessional education in the training of its health care professional students.
According to Mills, "the root case of 80 percent of deaths due to medical errors is poor teamwork." With a recent grant award from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation to integrate interprofessional education, that is, a cross-disciplinary approach to health care training, into clinical settings in Aroostook County, UNE hopes to both address the chronic shortage of health care professionals in rural Maine and improve patient safety by removing the "silos" in which health professionals have traditionally been trained and teaching them to work collaboratively instead.