TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 468 An example of this negotiated process happened after the first year of collaboration, when counseling faculty suggested changes in the scenarios presented to professional actors playing the roles of clients in the clinical component of the training. During the first year, the preparation of the professional actors was handled solely by a staff member employed by the medical school. As a result, the bulk of their presenting concerns were medical in nature. The majority of the professional actors appeared unprepared to discuss their psychological and sociocultural concerns. This was a major factor that affected collaboration because it made the initial practice session challenging for counseling and social work students who understandably felt that discussing medical presenting concerns was out of the scope of their competence and practice. During the second year of the training cycle, counseling faculty submitted case scenarios for the professional actors that started with an initial contact at a school or clinical mental health setting and that represented varied sociocultural and emotional concerns that coexist with physical medical concerns. This approach was intended to ensure that counseling students would be able to experience clinical training with case scenarios that were within their scope of study and practice and also allow them to practice making referrals to social workers and medical professionals. Additionally, counseling and social work faculty, the two disciplines outside the medical field, actively advocated for all case scenarios used in the training to be truly interdisciplinary in nature. This meant that all the presenting concerns presented by the professional actors needed to provide an opportunity for an interdisciplinary intervention during the referral process. Negotiating these changes in the second year was easier given the professional relationships, trust and mutual respect that had evolved over the year among faculty from the different participating disciplines. Our challenges in negotiating the professional weighting of the training processes are not unusual and are consistent with what Mascari and Webber (2006, 2013) and Mellin et al. (2011) discussed regarding the challenges inherent to cross-discipline practice among professionals who have received specialized training and who have unique professional identities. We should have never assumed that the coordinator of the professional actors, who is based in the medical school, would understand how to prepare the actors to engage with students in a manner that would allow for an interdisciplinary intervention. During the second year, faculty from the counseling program were more actively involved in the development of scenarios and instructions that would be shared with the professional actors playing the role of clients/patients in the project. In hindsight, the university SBIRT advisory council should have spent more time in deliberations about the potential obstacles that would emerge from interdisciplinary collaboration. We were excited about this new initiative and spent more time discussing the benefits and potential challenges for students rather than for the faculty and staff involved in the project. Thus, some identified challenges persisted in the second year. Interdisciplinary focus as a goal. We realized the importance of all key participants (faculty and program directors) having a clear understanding of the interdisciplinary training goal of this project. For example and as mentioned, counseling faculty had to advocate multiple times for an interdisciplinary outlook as the curriculum and training protocol was planned and developed. In hindsight, we realize that while the core focus of the project was interdisciplinary training, participants and trainers seemed to return to familiar patterns of silo training as the project was carried out. We are reminded that an interdisciplinary focus requires constant reminders and intentionality to keep the focus interdisciplinary. Another artifact of the challenges inherent to interdisciplinary initiatives that emerged was that it appeared participants (students) were not fully prepared to receive feedback during the training from