The mission of the USC Student-Run Clinic is to deliver quality patient care and enhance health professional education through a team-based approach to health care. As interprofessional care teams, we can learn about each other’s unique roles in healthcare delivery and work together to assess, diagnose, and optimize the patient’s health and lifestyle to suit their unique needs. Our clinic protocol was designed using evidence-based elements of the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model, which maintains that interprofessional healthcare teams can provide services more cost effectively than physicians alone and that team-based care improves quality of care, quantity of patients treated, and allows for more individualized care, which increases patient compliance and thus health outcomes.

 

Students from the five professions work together as teams under the supervision of USC attending physicians, pharmacists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, physician assistants, and residents. The teams also consist of students at different levels of training, allowing for multiple layers of supervision; this allows even first-year pre-clinical students to participate in our clinic model without impacting the quality of patient care. Furthermore, by training with students from different professions early in their graduate health education, USC health professional students will have excellent training in communication, teamwork, case-based critical thinking, and clinical procedural skills. The USC health professional programs are leading the way by having institutionalized the first interprofessional team-based Student-Run Clinic on the West Coast.