Public health professionals increasingly work in complex, interdependent systems where decisions made by one program, discipline, agency, or community partner affect outcomes across the broader public health infrastructure. Persistent challenges such as emergency preparedness, behavioral health access, communicable disease response, workforce shortages, health equity, and community trust require more than technical expertise. They require systems thinking, interprofessional collaboration, adaptive problem-solving, role clarity, shared leadership, and coordinated action. This skill-building session will use Friday Night at the ER©, an interactive team-based simulation game, to help participants practice these competencies in a dynamic, engaging, and low-risk learning environment. This skills-based simulation game is also part of the interprofessional Teamwork and Collaboration micro-credential, and University of Colorado Anschutz public health students are eligible to earn this badge.
Participants will work in small interprofessional teams to manage patient flow, resource constraints, and competing priorities across a simulated hospital system. While set in a healthcare environment, the learning principles directly translate to public health practice. Participants will experience how siloed decision-making, limited communication, and narrow role focus can undermine system-level performance, while shared situational awareness, flexible leadership, resource sharing, and coordinated planning can improve outcomes system-wide.
The session bridges public health workforce development and interprofessional education by emphasizing core competencies: teamwork, communication, values and ethics, roles and responsibilities, collaborative decision-making, and systems-based practice. In public health settings, these competencies are enacted not only among health professionals but also across governmental public health, community-based organizations, schools, healthcare systems, social services, emergency management, and policy partners. This applied learning experience allows participants to examine their own team behaviors, practice collaboration under pressure, and reflect on how professional roles and organizational structures influence collective action.
The session includes a brief orientation to systems-thinking and interprofessional collaboration, facilitated gameplay, structured reflection, and application to real-world public health contexts. The debrief will explore how teams communicated across roles, managed shared resources, responded to competing priorities, and shifted from individual task completion to collective system performance. Participants will then translate lessons from the game to public health scenarios such as outbreak response, cross-agency coordination, community partnership development, workforce deployment, health equity initiatives, and crisis communication.
This session supports best practices in professional development by using experiential learning, simulation, team-based reflection, and facilitated debriefing to build transferable skills. Pilot evaluation data from an initial implementation supports the relevance and feasibility of this approach. Participants reported strong learner response, including that the experience was valuable, fun and engaging, relevant to their work, and useful for practicing collaboration. Qualitative feedback highlighted increased awareness of the whole system, the need to think beyond assigned roles, the importance of sharing resources, and the value of communicating and planning collectively before acting.
This session is highly relevant to public health professionals and the conference theme, “Stronger Together,” because it moves collaboration from concept to practice. Participants will leave with concrete strategies for strengthening teamwork, systems thinking, and interprofessional collaboration across programs, agencies, disciplines, and community partnerships.
