Promoting Readiness for Collaboration Among Social Work Students: A Key Aspect of Behavioral Health Care

Background and Purpose: Social work students must work collaboratively with other professionals to ensure clients’ behavioral health needs are met. However, students rarely receive specified training on developing their skills for collaboration. Therefore, they enter the field at a deficit, which can have a detrimental effect on individuals who have historically received inferior care, especially people of color living in medically underserved areas or health professional shortage areas. Because of this potential for harm, behavioral health workforce development programs are working on training social work students alongside other medical professionals; however, little is known about whether this program helps promote readiness for interprofessional collaboration among students. This lack of information makes it difficult to understand whether these programs have the potential to influence students’ abilities in the behavioral health profession. The purpose of this study was to examine whether social work participants had increased readiness for collaboration after participating in a behavioral health workforce development program.

Methods: This study used a one-group pretest-posttest design with final-year MSW students participating in a behavioral health training program (N = 29) alongside nursing students. Quantitative data were gathered at baseline and at the conclusion of the program to assess readiness for collaboration. Three externally validated instruments were used: the 14-item Attitudes Toward Health Care Teams Scale, the 17-item Team Skills Scale, and 15 items about experiences in behavioral health practice extracted from the Inventory of Behavioral Health Competencies Survey. All scales were self-reported and used a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Paired samples t-tests were used to examine pre and post-test scores. Effect sizes were based on Cohen’s d.

Results: The 29 students participating in the program were between 24 - 54 years of age (M = 31), predominantly female, non-veterans, with 43% identifying as LatinX, all in urban Chicago. The paired sample t-test indicated significant improvement between pretest and posttest data for all measures. The Health Care Teams scale showed improvements, with mean scores for before (M = 4.62, SD = 0.56) and mean scores for after the program (M = 4.00, SD = 0.92); t(29)=3.29, p<.01. The effect size was 0.62. Similarly, the Team Skills Scale showed improvements, with mean scores for before (M = 4.34, SD = 0.72) and mean scores for after the program (M = 3.76, SD = 1.02); t(29)=3.48 , p<.01. The effect size was 0.58. The Behavioral Health Competencies had similar results; mean scores for before (M = 3.93, SD = 1.10) and after the program (M = 4.45, SD = 0.68); t(29)=3.48 , p<.01. The effect size was 0.62.

Conclusions and Implications: Results from this study demonstrated the promise of one workforce development program in preparing social work students to work collaboratively. Working with different professionals on established interprofessional teams assists students in acquiring an extensive understanding of how to work effectively as a member of such teams to address the needs of historically oppressed clients.