The accrediting bodies for health professions require interprofessional practice and education (IPE) to improve the readiness of graduates for team-based care (Health Professions Accreditors Collaborative, 2019). Typically, we think of IPE as educational activities designed for students in traditional health fields, but I would like to recommend engaging students in disciplines outside health care to focus on problem-solving and innovation through the use of design thinking (DT).

DT is a human-centered approach to solving complex problems in an iterative process of empathic listening, defining the problem, brainstorming ideas, prototyping, and testing until a desired outcome is reached (Altman, Huang, & Breland, 2018). It has been used in research studies to create health care innovations with positive effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction results (Altman et al., 2018).

Let us take an example to illustrate how this approach might work. Faculty from two to three different disciplines can develop an interprofessional course on DT in health care using a problem-based approach. Content on the five steps in DT - empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test - can be taught online, while the in-class sessions focus on solving problems with small teams of students from different disciplines. (Modules for teaching DT are available for faculty to use without charge. These modules were developed by a team led by Marian Leary at the University of Pennsylvania. Go to https://designthinkingforhealth.org/ for information.)

During the semester, students can be challenged to think of persistent problems to solve in health care. For example, consider new mothers who want to breastfeed their babies while in the hospital. From a nurse's perspective, the concern is the latching of the baby to the breast, but might new mothers have different perspectives? In the empathize step, members of the interprofessional student team record the flow of people going in and out of the rooms of new mothers. Later, after discharge, the team interviews mothers to hear their stories. From these observations and interviews, the team might find that mothers experienced interruptions, on average, every 30 minutes. The mothers' stories point to several issues: the lack of a bonding experience with infants during breastfeeding because of interruptions, the fear of having their breasts exposed to others during breastfeeding, and the inability to relax enough for milk (colostrum) to let down. Ultimately, the team defines the problem as lack of privacy during breastfeeding.

During the ideation step, the team considers many different solutions by brainstorming. After creating a list of possible solutions, they consider which three solutions are feasible and would target the problem of lack of privacy. They reach out to a few new mothers to ask about these possible three solutions. Mothers like the idea of having an app on their phone that would trigger an electronic sign on the hospital door to signal privacy. They say they could also use it when they want to nap.

The team moves into the design of a working prototype. Because the team has students from computer science, nursing, and art, they create an attractive, functional app for testing in a hospital. They test the app with electronic door sign for two weeks and ask participant mothers to complete a usability questionnaire. The mothers rate the usability of the app high because the user interface was simple to learn and it created the privacy they needed.

Through such an IPE experience, nurses can learn how to lead teams to innovate care to meet the needs of patients. This ability to innovate is a critical skill that should be taught in undergraduate and graduate nursing programs. It will inspire our next generation of nurse leaders to innovate and find solutions to real-world problems in health care.

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