Master in Advanced Health Care Practice - Interprofessional Pain Management

The Interprofessional Pain Management Program (IPM) lets clinicians seeking new skills and expertise enhance their clinical approach to pain management. Healthcare professionals from a variety of disciplines, including medicine, physiotherapy, pharmacy, nursing, occupational therapy, social work, psychology, and dentistry will benefit from the program.

The program’s competency-based education approach means you’re evaluated on how you apply the knowledge you learn and how you integrate this into patient care.

The IPM program teaches you to challenge traditional ways of thinking and being in practice. You’ll be encouraged to seek creative solutions and support in developing advanced clinical reasoning and critical thinking skills. These skills are essential for understanding and treating diverse experiences of pain and for clinicians working in pain management to master.

Program Features

• Receive one-on-one support and guidance from an experienced mentor during your clinical mentorship
• Be evaluated on your professional accomplishments and through authentic learning experiences
• Learn to apply clinical decision-making skills to develop comprehensive and individualized healing plans for patients
• Design and carry out a group research project and write a publication-ready scientific paper

The Interprofessional Pain Management program is built upon a competency-based educational framework where learners are focused on the development of core competencies until they have accrued enough evidence to demonstrate mastery in the eyes of an independent reviewer.

With traditional approaches, time is fixed (usually a term or semester) while the outcome is variable (the mark each student receives). In a CBE approach, time is variable (take as long as is needed to master the competency) but the outcome is fixed (everyone masters the competency). In a pure CBE program, courses are replaced by learning activities, practice, and implementation of entrustable professional activities. Evidence of mastery is accrued through direct observation, simulations, reflections, and other ways of showing that the learner has mastered the competency in a real-world setting.

Through successful completion of this program, students will have demonstrated mastery of five key competencies:

1. Interprofessional Collaboration
2. Self-Awareness and Reflexivity
3. Critical Reasoning and Creative Problem-Solving
4. Empathic Practice and Reasoning
5. Pain Expertise

Clinical Mentorship

A key component of this program is the academic/clinical mentorship requirement. Students will be assigned their own academic mentor with whom they will meet for standing meetings every two weeks. They will be expected to work with the academic mentor and the program to identify a suitable clinical mentor from whom they would like to learn. This clinical mentor need not necessarily be an expert in pain management but should be seen as a trusted and respected clinician with whom the learner can engage for a minimum of 15 hours (five hours per term). The nature of this engagement may look different for different learners depending on context and geographic accessibility. Examples would be discussions of complex patient cases, shadowing, direct mentorship in the clinic, discussions about new clinical knowledge, or learning of new clinical techniques. Learners will maintain a log of each mentorship session, and the clinical mentors will receive a small stipend for their provision of mentorship hours.

Satisfying the clinical mentorship requirement includes:

• Engagement with approved clinical mentors
• Submission of an engagement log at the end of each term demonstrating the hours completed and the nature of the mentorship
• A minimum of five hours per term (15 hours total) of direct interaction between student and clinical mentor
  • These critical interactions should also be captured throughout the student’s portfolio as evidence of mastery of one or more of the required competencies

Students are responsible for securing their own clinical mentor(s).