Description/Overview: Communication in the new millennium can be characterized as technologically-based, informal, and instantaneous. Contemporary students communicate through technology in a highly informal manner and may be unaware of the problems with their communication techniques (Zimmerman & Milligan, 2008). The importance of communication skills in the health professions is associated with increased quality of care and positive patient outcomes (IOM, 2001). Yet, in current nursing curricula, little education and training is devoted to this topic (Allison, 2007). In nursing curricula, students are educated in the principles of good provider-with-patient communication and are afforded opportunities to practice verbal communication skills in a variety of simulated and actual teaching-learning situations. Because future health care practitioners will be required to work in interprofessional teams, national curriculum development guidance documents call for training future health care professionals in interprofessional communication (AACN Essentials, 2008). To respond to this need for curricular reform and to advance the practice-research interface, an innovative and collaborative learning experience for undergraduate nursing students was created using standardized colleagues, a method based on the standardized patient teaching strategy. Colleague-to-colleague scenarios depicting communication challenges using standardized colleagues were compared to the use of more traditional small group discussions around videotaped interprofessional scenarios. Because health professionals are required to work in interprofessional teams, an academic collaboration was started among the Schools of Nursing, Pharmacy, and Medicine. Effective interprofessional communication maximizes the abilities and knowledge of the entire patient care team leading to more positive outcomes for patients. This symposium will describe the unique and inventive standardized colleague model, outline the creation of this educational strategy to improve nursing students’ interprofessional communication, and report on the resulting findings of the study.

Learner Objective #1: The learner will be able to describe the educational underpinnings of the standardized colleague educational strategy.

Learner Objective #2: The learner will be able to evaluate opportunities to integrate standardized colleagues within nursing education programs.