Interprofessional Health Care Ethics and Moral Judgment

Landry, Karen Ainsworth

Monday, 18 November 2013

Karen Ainsworth Landry, PhD, RN
College of Nursing, Texas A&M Health Scienc Center, Bryan, TX
Regina Bentley, RN, MSN, EdD
College of Nursing, University of Alabama Capstone College of Nursing, Tuscaloosa, AL

Learning Objective 1: Discuss moral judgment assessment in an interprofessional healthcare ethics course.

Learning Objective 2: Examine DIT2 scores of professional healthcare students.

Interprofessional collaborative practice is the “gold standard” for academic institutions across the United States, as well as, internationally. Teaching students across professional boundaries in a collaborative environment to learn with, from and about each other can only lead to positive health outcomes. In 2011, Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice document was developed. This document is supported by nursing, osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, dental, general medicine, and public health.

In fall, 2012, a study was conducted in an interprofessional healthcare ethics course. The purpose of this study was to examine DIT2 scores of nursing, medicine, pharmacy and chaplain students. IRB approval was received. The instrument used in this study was the Defining Issues Test (2). This instrument identifies moral judgment/reasoning by utilizing 1) personal interest schema (personal experience within a moral dilemma), 2) maintaining norms schema (the importance of authorities) and 3) schema (public policy). The methodology is a quasi-experimental design using a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest (no randomization). The population recruited was nursing, medical, pharmacy and chaplain students. The age was limited to 19 to 70 year olds, both male and female and all categories of race/ethnicity, however, only English speaking students were in the study. DIT2 scores analyzed from the fall 2012 Interprofessional Healthcare Ethics course. Statistical analyses will be conducted using SPSS version 21.0 software package for Windows. Demographic data will be analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

The authors will present the findings of this study which will include demographic data of each cohort, DIT2 results and differences in DIT2 results between the cohorts.

Recommendations and further research will be discussed.

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