Dr. Jeong Park - IHSO Spotlight

Interprofessional Healthcare and Education – we hear a lot about it, yet many of us don’t know how it’s implemented nor how it really works. One educator and a leading innovator within this department is Dr. Jeong Park. As an integral member of an interdisciplinary care team for solid organ transplant patients, Dr. Park finds many strengths in the nature of an interdisciplinary team when it comes to patient care, teaching, Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) and collaborative research. As a pharmacist, she continuously strives

to improve in all her endeavors as a leader in the domains of education, research, and service to contribute to the Michigan Difference and to advocate for the profession of pharmacy.

Getting to know the transplant pharmacist down the street:

Dr. Park comes from a unique background – one that includes a number of experiences. She completed her pharmacy education in South Korea. Upon moving to the United States to become a clinical faculty, she went back to school and received her PharmD degree from the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy. During her education in Iowa, transplant research was a topic that sparked Dr. Park’s interest motivating her to pursue a fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington upon graduation. Knowing that she wanted to maintain an active role in clinical pharmacy services and balance that with teaching and research, Dr. Park completed her clinical residency training at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. After all this training, learning, and experience-building, Dr. Park joined the clinical faculty team at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy and Michigan Medicine where she’s been an intricate part of the transplant team for the past fifteen years.

Although Dr. Park’s passion for interprofessional health started during her days at the University of Iowa, she discovered its sizeable potential within the complexity of a transplant team. The solid organ transplant procedure is a complex process that requires many dynamic members. At the start, a patient requires an interdisciplinary team to evaluate and approve their candidacy for organ transplant. Followed by, a surgeon to perform the procedure, a nurse to provide post-surgery care, a pharmacist to manage post-transplant medications and patient education, as well as many other healthcare providers to actively contribute to the process. A common goal that is shared among all of its members is to achieve a successful transplant and prevent graft rejection in the future. Although some members of team may fade out over time due to the nature of their position, a pharmacist is someone that remains an active member throughout a patient’s lifetime. Due to this fact, Dr. Park learned the importance of interdisciplinary education and how to implement it into her teaching philosophy, both within the in-class didactic environment and the out-in-practice clinical experience.

Advice to students moving forward:

Some advice that Dr. Park has for future healthcare providers looking to pursue a career in a clinical setting is to seek out opportunities where one may be able to achieve IPE competencies. The core skills that every healthcare provider who desires to become an integral member on a treatment team needs to continuously work on are:

1. Respect and appreciate other disciplines

2. Understand the roles and expertise that others hold

3. Communicate effectively and efficiently with other disciplines

4. Work as a team to bring the best possible care to patients

Without the common respect, understanding and communication, it is very easy to have a dysfunctional team. When and if this occurs, the patient is the one that always pays the largest price. Understanding the language that our colleagues speak is one of the first steps we can take to creating a well-designed team. Subsequent strides in this direction include seeking out opportunities in former course, using your current network to expand it, reaching out to shadow and learn about other disciplines, and interacting during student organization events that bring people together. Whether it’s reading an article or listening to a news podcast, it is always important to keep oneself informed about what worldwide initiatives are occurring to advance global health.

In the near future, Dr. Park is strategizing to collaborate with her transplant pharmacy colleagues at Michigan Medicine and lead team-taught education initiatives in transplant pharmacotherapy, such as an elective didactic course and a layered-learning inpatient clinical rotation. While Dr. Park makes headways in this direction, as students we should continue exploring each and every avenue available to us. They say that no one ever stops learning, so why not continue today?