Thinking Outside the Box: Online Interprofessional Education to Identify and Respond to Child Maltreatment

Background and Purpose: Interprofessional education (IPE) has been recognized as an integral component of several social work competencies. To date, many IPE activities have been developed for health-focused social work students to enhance interprofessional collaborative practice. However, to date, fewer IPE activities have been developed specific to child welfare and maltreatment, despite this being one of the most frequent areas of work for social work graduates. Moreover, child maltreatment reporting and response often requires coordination with multiple outside disciplines, such as educators, healthcare workers, and law enforcement.

This study explored student experiences with an online IPE module that focused on equitable mandated reporting. The IPE module consisted of an introductory post in interdisciplinary teams, presentation of policies and procedures related to equitable mandated reporting, a group analysis of a case of suspected child maltreatment, and a debriefing post. The module was piloted in Spring 2022 with a group of social work, athletic training, and education students.

Method: Open-ended debriefing forms were completed by 48 students and four students opted to participate in a follow-up focus group. Two researchers independently coded each data source (debriefing forms and transcript from the focus group) using a qualitative thematic analysis approach. Two stages of analyses were conducted: in the first stage, the researchers identified codes that emerged from the data; in the second stage, a constant comparison approach was used to collapse codes into large themes.

Results: We identified three main themes related to student experiences: 1) improving professional skills and competencies; 2) hearing diverse/different perspectives; and 3) working in interprofessional teams to achieve common goals. In the first theme, students reported enhanced professional and personal competencies, including critical thinking, self-awareness, and effective communication. In the second theme, students described the positive impact of hearing diverse perspectives from other disciplines on a case related to child maltreatment. In the third theme, students reflected on how interdisciplinary team work could help them better respond to maltreatment.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings highlight the importance of interprofessional education in child welfare to prepare future practitioners for work in interdisciplinary teams. Indeed, students reported increased critical thinking and self-reflection skills, both of which could contribute to more equitable reporting and responses to child maltreatment. Future research could examine changes in attitudes and perceptions of maltreatment and in cultural humility among participants.