INTRODUCTION: To engender competent and equipped healthcare professionals, a working educational system that allow and facilitate multiprofessional and interprofessional partnership should be in place to foster and deliver better outcomes by effectively and efficiently enhancing the quality of healthcare education. Interprofessional Education is a learning and teaching approach that allow two or more healthcare professions to learn with, from and about each other. To meet the objective, academic reform should be undertaken that encompasses silos, profession centrism, and medical priviledge that has long been identified as obstacles in collaborative patient care. Recognizing the stakeholders perspective and preferences would yield an interprofessional education program that would cater to this need.
OBJECTIVES: The primary goal of the study is to establish this educational reform on the context of exploring the predilections of the stakeholders of healthcare towards interprofessional education as a pedagogical approach so that it may serve as a basis for a curricular program in keeping with the challenges of ASEAN integration.
METHODS: The research utilized Conjoint Analysis (CA) in the process of collecting and analyzing data as it elicits preferences while allowing estimation of relative importance of attributes identified based on literature which was short listed for validity and applicability via Orthogonal Array (OA). CA was conducted using of conjoint cards which was sorted and ranked accordingly by the research sample. Descriptive statistics were applied to further explore attributes and respondent characteristics. For the investigation, two countries served as study locale. For both locales, a higher education institution that delivers undergraduate and post graduate education that sponsored and conducted an annual international and multidisciplinary research conference provided the venue. Medical and paramedical professionals coming in from various countries in Asia and the Pacific who attended and participated during the international conferences both held in Thailand and in the Philippines respectively, served as subjects to the study. Data gathering was conducted between the months of October 2017 to March of 2018. Purposive and convenience sampling was utilized for this research initiative. Eligibility criteria required participants to be duly licensed professionals who are engaged in the academe for at least a year.
RESULTS: The corpus of data was gathered from a total of 100 participants of which seventy-three (73) are female and twenty-seven (27) are male. The research population represented twenty-five (25) Asia-Pacific countries namely Philippines, Ghana, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Liberia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, South Korea, Senegal, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Argentina, Canada, China, Ethiopia, Seychelles, India, Angola, Malawi, Colombia and Australia. A total of 7 medical and paramedical professions took part which was constituted by doctors, dentist, nurses, public health professionals, medical technologists, nutritionists, and psychologists. Conjoint Analysis revealed that the most preferred interprofessional education program is one that teaches both basic concepts and skills as content, composed by a mix of undergraduate and graduate participants in a venue-based setting to facilitate interaction and collaboration through exploratory teaching methods which is to be taken as a course. It was also highlighted that among the five attributes of interprofessional education, Setting is the major factor considered when choosing an IPE program with a relative importance of 43.7%. Specifically, interpersonal setting is preferred over one done on a virtual platform. It is then followed by content with a relative importance of 15.8%. Basic concepts and skills is most preferred as content. Teaching methods has a relative importance of 14.5% with preference for exploratory methods. Participants have a relative importance of 13.1%. It is noticeable that combination of undergraduate and graduate/professional participants (0.107) was preferred more than just undergraduate (0.027) or graduate/professional (-0.133) participants only. Format had the least importance with 12.8% importance of which course was the preferred factor level.
CONCLUSION: This project was undertaken to develop an interprofessional education program model by exploring the preferences of the stakeholders of healthcare. This research captured the stakeholders perspective making the findings and its product highly likely to be adopted as it was the stakeholder's preferences that served as basis for the innovation. The results of this study indicate that a well-designed interprofessional program that would reinforce and facilitate interpersonal learning, growth, and collaboration within and multi-disciplined medical and paramedical multilevel learners is most preferred. Based on these results, a model for interprofessional education was conceptualized which illustrates the interrelatedness of IPE and its attributes as it fits in the Baldrige framework for performance excellence as it is conjoined by the Interpersonal Relations Theory. Interpersonal learning opportunities between and among professions of varied levels of competence fosters collaborative practice. The model will serve as a benchmark for a program to be implemented on the Philippine context in line with the ASEAN Integration.
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