9
COM Outlook . Spring 2015
COMmunications
NSU-COM Students Assist
the Homeless in Hollywood
On February 6, The
OMS-I class Student
Government Association
(SGA) organized an event
to benefit the
Home-
less Voice Shelter in
Hollywood, Florida
,
and the homeless popula-
tion living in the city. The
humanitarian undertak-
ing involved purchasing
various items, making
ham and cheese and
peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches, and providing a bag of chips with each sandwich.
The SGA provided most of the materials by going to a local
wholesaler and purchasing the items required to make and
bag the food items.
Through the efforts of NSU-COM students, upwards of
700 sandwiches were made and over $2,000 worth of food,
coffee, and laundry detergent were delivered to the Homeless
Voice Shelter.
“When going to the deliver the items, it was heartbreak-
ing to see the conditions that these folks were living in,” said
OMS-I Parth Gandhi. “The shelter’s director was brought to
tears, and strangers who were living on the street approached
us to thank us wholeheartedly. It is our duty as citizens of this
community to do what we can to help provide basic necessi-
ties such as food and coffee for the homeless population. It
is the SGA’s hope that this event will spark a movement and
encourage all students to take part in similar events in the
near future.”
IPE Day Highlights
Interprofessional Collaboration
The NSU-COM Center for Interprofessional Education and
Practice (CIPEP) hosted the inaugural
NSU Interprofes-
sional Education (IPE) Day
on February 17. The event,
which centered on the theme
Putting All the Pieces Together for
Quality Patient Care
, brought together students from two or
more NSU Health Professions Division (HPD) disciplines to
share and learn together in order to create effective collabora-
tion and improve health outcomes.
Frederick Lippman, R.Ph., Ed.D., HPD chancellor, offered a
welcome message to the crowd of nearly 400 students, while Ceci-
lia Rokusek Ed.D., R.D., assistant dean of research and innovation
and CIPEP director, shared her enthusiasm at the opening of the
concurrent sessions. Gordon Chen, M.D., senior vice president of
ChenMed—a Florida-based national primary care delivery system
committed to delivering high-value interprofessional care to se-
niors in underserved areas—was the keynote speaker.
All HPD students had the opportunity to participate in ses-
sions that represented a blend of interprofessional simulation
experiences, interprofessional theory, and interactive case-study
reviews that highlighted the core competencies of interprofes-
sional collaborative practice. These included values/ethics for
interprofessional practice, roles/responsibilities, interprofes-
sional communication, and teams and teamwork.
IPE represents a major accreditation priority for many
health profession programs, and IPE Day served as a great
opportunity to integrate interprofessional education into the
health professions curriculum. The CIPEP strives to develop
NSU students as interprofessional leaders for the workforce
and plans to host IPE Day twice a year. The initiative is a testa-
ment to NSU’s commitment to increasing collaboration among
its programs and improving health for all.
