Academic to Clinical: Nursing and Physical Therapy Collaborative Attitudes After Interprofessional Simulation

Background: Healthcare is becoming more complex and communication between professions is necessary to improve issues surrounding patient safety, medication errors, and healthcare costs. To address communication needs, interprofessional collaboration has become a focus for healthcare. Interprofessional collaboration is an inititative that has been adopted by many healthcare organizations. Interprofessional collaboration needs to be implemented into the curriculum of all health profession programs to better prepare these individuals for practice and address the silos that still exist. Simulation is one way to implement this concept into the curriculum. Simulation is a teaching strategy that has been utilized in health education programs and has been shown to be effective in the areas of teamwork and communication. The population consisted of traditional nursing students and doctorate of physical therapy students because of the high occurrence of the two professions interacting and treating acute-care patients in the hospital setting. Method: This quasi-experimental design study was conducted to look at changes in attitudes of interprofessional collaboration using students from nursing and physical therapy. Two tools were used for data collection that included the Interprofessional Attitudes Scale and the TeamSTEPPS Teamworks Attitudes Questionnaire. Data was collected before, immediately after, and 6 months after participating in the simulation. The simluation required both professions to work together in caring for a patient in the acute-care setting. Statistics were conducted to compare scores over time, change between professions, and change within professions. Results: Overall, the results showed statistical significance in all subscales of both tools when looking at all three times. Upon closer inspection, the significance was mainly noted between times of pre-simulation to immediate post-simulation and pre-simulation to 6 months post-simulation. Conclusion: These results show that the simulation did improve students’ attitudes toward interprofessional collaboration, which infers that an interprofessional simulation can be an effective teaching strategy for interprofessional collaboration. Although there was not a significant difference between the times of immediate post-simulation to 6 months post-simulation, there was not a decline in scores, which means that students retained the information learned from the simulation making the experience successful on positively effecting students’ attitudes towards interprofessional collaboration.