Using Simulation to Improve Students' Attitude Toward Interprofessional Practice

Introduction and Background

Interprofessional education (IPE) is important in providing comprehensive healthcare because it fosters collaboration, communication, coordination, networking, and teamwork; it can minimize patient errors and maximizes patient quality of care. However, students in the caring professions, such as social work, nursing, nutrition, and physician assistants, are trained in the theories, attitudes and values of the professions for which they are studying. This can lead to competition and siloization in providing patient care. Thus, multiple professions serve barriers to providing comprehensive and integrated healthcare services to those in need of them. The issue is further complicated when patients come from medically underserved communities.

IPE can be defined as two or more professions working together to understand each other, as well as learn with and from each other. The interdisciplinary framework allows patient care to be supported through multiple perspectives by the contribution of each profession’s expertise in an interprofessional team. IPE effectively trains students to cooperatively deliver quality care by addressing barriers created by student attitudes, perceptions, level of skill and power dynamics in working in a team. Simulation exercises, as part of IPE, can play a decisive role in altering student attitudes and perceptions by exposing them to the opportunity to understand each profession’s perspectives and exploring how to work together to meet the complex needs of patients requiring healthcare.

Method

The simulation activity was a virtual mock interprofessional team meeting in which students from Physician Assistant Studies, Nursing, Nutrition, and Social Work reviewed a simulated patient’s record, met together to work out an intervention plan, met with an actor simulating the patient, and discussed their responses to the outcome of the interview. There was a total of 77 students, divided up as 8 Physician Assistant Studies, 25 Nursing, 10 Nutrition, and 34 Social Work, who participated in the study. Students were asked to volunteer to complete the Interprofessional Attitudes Scale (IPAS) before their first meeting together and again after the debriefing session following the simulation exercise. Students were also asked to complete a feedback form in which they assessed what they learned and what they liked and disliked. It was hypothesized that the exercise would result in a change in student attitudes toward other professions and consequently increase their willingness and ability to work collaboratively with them.

Findings

Data analysis shows a statistical significance between the pre-test and the post-test. There was no significant difference between the four groups in the results. Significant improvement was noted in in the post-test over the pre-test in students’ discovery of the different values, cultures, knowledge, and perspectives of other healthcare professions and how those differences can contribute to more effective patient care.

Conclusions and Implications

Based on these findings, it is concluded that a change in students’ attitudes toward other professions, brought about by their participation in the simulation exercise, increased their ability and likelihood to work collaboratively, upon graduation, with other professions in providing interprofessional healthcare.