A main cause of patient safety incidents are avoidable failures in communication between health professionals. In response, healthcare has entered an era of interprofessionalism in education and patient care. A challenge to substantiating the value of interprofessional education (IPE) has been a limited number of studies that assess the effectiveness of IPE interventions compared to education interventions in which professions were learning separately from one another. This research project helps fill this gap and measures the differences in student interprofessional socialization (IS) between an IPE cohort and a usual care group of one-discipline learners. The purpose was to compare IS in mixed-discipline and single-discipline only student cohorts and to determine if mixed-discipline students demonstrate greater improvement in IS compared to single-discipline cohorts of students.
Methods:
The conceptual/theoretical framework of IS informs variables of interest selected for this design. IS includes five attributes: building interprofessional awareness, experiential learning, managing professional role/team expectation congruence, valuing, and evolving knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The research project begins preliminary examination of the proposed concept analysis of IS by investigating the IS attribute of experiential learning.
Readiness for collaborative practice was operationalized as IS and measured using the Interprofessional Socialization and Valuing Scale (ISVS). The study design was a quasi-experimental, cohort study. The study utilized pre-test/post-test of student groups to compare in- and between-group IS. The outcome variable of interest was IS. The predictor or intervention variable was the student cohort (either mixed-discipline or nursing only).
Results:
One hundred and fifteen students participated in the mixed-discipline cohort while 51 students participated in the nursing student only cohort. Statistically significant increases in IS were seen with all participants, in individual cohorts and in all IS subscales both with all participants and individual cohorts. No difference was observed between nursing student only learners versus a cohort of mixed-discipline students.
Conclusion:
The study demonstrates that IS can be significantly increased through well designed learning in teamwork and collaboration whether students participate with single-discipline peers or mixed-discipline settings.