Assessing the Effectiveness of an Innovative Interprofessional Home Environment Simulation Training

Background and Purpose: Home visits are a key part of being a health and social service professional. However, students often do not receive hands-on, interprofessional learning in class to prepare them for home assessments at practicum placements or after graduation. This leaves home assessment training to practicum agencies, which can lead to variability in training depth, standardization, and quality. This interprofessional project between social work and rehabilitation health sciences at a large urban university created six innovative online modules and a live workshop, that guided students through interactive video and AI-simulated scenarios of home assessments for people with disabilities and older adults.

Methods:

In a phase 1 pilot, 33 students in social work (42%) and rehabilitation health sciences (58%) (including occupational therapy, physical therapy, nutrition, and speech-language pathology) programs participated in this interprofessional home-based assessment training. Students identified as women (87.1%), white (77.4%), Black/African-American (9.7%), Asian (9.7%), Hispanic (6.5%), ages 18-25 years old (48.4%), and 25-40 (45.2%). Students completed a pre-/post-assessment of their knowledge related to each of the module's learning objectives. At the end of the live workshop, students also completed questions about their experiences with the training and the Student Perceptions of Interprofessional Clinical Education-Revised.

Phase 2 is currently in progress including 100 students from social work (46%) and health and rehabilitation sciences (38%), as well as the medical school (8%) and physician assistant program (8%). Students identified as women (82.6%), white (66.1%), Black/African-American (5.2%), Asian (19.1%), Hispanic (12.2%), ages 18-25 years old (52.2%), and 25-40 (40.9%).

Results:

Phase 1 results show: 1) Students had statistically significant pre-post gains related to the learning objectives (p< 0.05), and 2) 94-100% interdisciplinary students developed positive perceptions of interprofessional practice. Post-training, across the 7 modules, 92.09% “strongly agreed” or “agreed” with “this module will help me apply practice skills in the topic area” and 93.49% “strongly agreed” or “agreed” with “This module expanded my knowledge and understanding of the topic area”. At baseline, 9.7% agreed with the statement “I could identify a range of reliable and valid home-based tools that assess a range of biopsychosocial and environment domains,” and post-training, 93.5% reported “strongly agree”/“agree”.

Preliminary results of Phase 2 also show pre-post training improvement in the learning objectives (p<.05). Across the 7 modules, 94.9% “strongly agree” or “agree” with “this module will help me apply practice skills in the topic area” and 92.23% “strongly agreed” or “agreed” with “This module expanded my knowledge and understanding of the topic area”.

Conclusions and Implications:

Students gained valuable, hands-on experience performing home visits in a low-stakes environment, better preparing them for practicums and their careers. Given the vital need and demand for in-home services, a workforce with advanced training in conducting culturally responsive home-based visits and preparedness in interdisciplinary teamwork is exceedingly important. This training provides participants with vital tools to assess a home environment and advocate on a larger policy level so that individuals can remain in their homes safely. Further evaluation is needed for long-term effectiveness in skill application in real-world settings.