Ensuring Healthier Outcomes for Patients through Innovative Interprofessional Education

Background and Purpose: The rapid expansion of patient-centered, integrated models of health care demands that we prepare students to work on interprofessional teams to provide integrated, comprehensive care. Social work has moved firmly into a need for partnership training models, as our newest EPAS guidelines explicitly call for interprofessional education (IPE). While IPE is not a new model, we have not been consistently involved in training partnerships. Three professional schools partnered to provide IPE events for social work (n=42), medicine (n=108), and pharmacy (n=49) students.

Methods: This research involved pre- and post-data collected from an IPE event conducted with health profession students from two large universities. Students (N=198) worked in small interprofessional teams to complete an assessment and formulate a treatment plan with standardized older adult patients presenting with complex psychosocial and medical histories. Students debriefed the encounter with faculty from the three disciplines, focusing on team functioning, communication differences across the professions, and professional roles in team-based care. Assessment included Likert-scale items on beliefs about other health professions & items from the standardized "Attitudes Toward Interprofessional Healthcare Teams" scale; these were administered in the week prior to the exercise, and immediately after the event, and students responded to five open-ended questions at post-test. Paired sample t-tests were conducted on the data, and narrative responses were coded for themes. We hypothesized that students’ attitudes and beliefs would be positively influenced by this experience, and that their perspectives of training would be changed.

Results: Of 97 students who completed both assessments, there was a statistically significant difference between pre- and post- ratings of attitudes towards interprofessional healthcare teams and patient care (p=<.01). Findings from the assessment showed significant changes in social work students’ beliefs about interprofessional healthcare provision (p=.009; n=22) and attitudes about interprofessional teamwork (p=.001; n=22), and there were positive changes in 6 of 11 belief domains and 11 of 14 attitude domains. Overall, social work students experienced improved comfort and confidence in participating in interprofessional team work and improved confidence in the value of social work on the interprofessional health team. They gained awareness of and respect for the skills of the other health profession students and increased their appreciation of the complementarity of the three health professions in patient care. Students reported that they felt that this should be a mandatory training in each degree program.

Conclusions and Implications: This type of training holds promise for integrating IPE case-based learning, assessment skills training, and team skills into the social work curriculum. In this IPE experience, the debriefing with students and faculty from all three professions intentionally focused on the issues of power and skill sets, and forced examination of the preconceived notions that may have been present, as well as whether such biases were grounded in fact or culture. Issues related to both perceived hierarchy and perceptions of skills of other team mates were challenged and discussed, leading to rich discussions about what kinds of trainings, topics, and perspectives different professions have.