Madeline Schmitt, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor Emerita, is a nurse-sociologist who, until retirement, was Professor and Independence Foundation Chair in Nursing and Interprofessional Education at the University of Rochester (NY), School of Nursing. She consults and presents nationally and internationally on collaborative practice and IPE.
She remains active in research and publication, as well as limited teaching. Recently, she was a co-investigator for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [RWJF] INQRI grant focused on staff nurse care coordination. A dissemination grant, also from RWJF, resulted in an educational video tested on selected nursing units at Emory University hospitals to help nurses understand, articulate and improve their interprofessional care coordination role. She was also recently a co-investigator for a multi-year ethnography focusing on the integration of an interprofessional palliative care team into the acute hospital setting. Her research program focused on collaborative practice models dates back to the early 1970’s.
She is an Editor Emerita of the Journal of Interprofessional Care, is a founding Board Member of the International Association for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (InterEd), and a founding Board member of the recently incorporated American Interprofessional Health Collaborative.
She was a Co-Chair of the All Altogether, Better Health III international IPE conference in London in 2006, and the major consultant to the first American-Canadian joint conference focused on IPE-- Collaborating Across Borders [CAB] I—held in 2007 at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center. CAB is a biennial meeting organized by the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative and American Interprofessional Health Collaborative in cooperation with local hosts. She was also part of the executive team organizing CAB III, held in Tucson, AZ in November 2011, with local hosts the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center and the Arizona Telemedicine Program, with support from the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center.
She was a U.S. member of the WHO Task Force who, in 2010, produced the report, Framework for Action in Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice. In 2010-2011, she chaired an Expert Panel commissioned by the Interprofessional Education Collaborative [IPEC]- comprised of the AACN, AACOM, AACP, ADEA, ASPH and AAMC- to develop U.S. core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice. This work led to a major conference to examine the competencies and develop implementation action plans hosted by the Health Resources and Services Administration, and co-sponsored by The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, and RWJF in February, 2011. The core competencies report and the HRSA meeting report were released together on May 10, 2011 in Washington, DC at the National Press Club.
She is sole or co-author of more than 100 professional publications. Her honors include induction as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 1977 and the National Academies of Practice in 2000, which honored her with their Award for Interdisciplinary Creativity.
