Objective: Patient safety has high priority in health care. Since successful interprofessional collaboration is essential for patient safety, the topic should ideally be addressed interprofessionally in the curricula. The aim of the project was the development and implementation of an interprofessional teaching concept "patient safety" for medical students and students of health professions at the Medical Faculty Heidelberg.
Methodology: The learning objectives were formulated on the basis of the “Patient Safety Learning Objective Catalog” (“Lernzielkatalog Patientensicherheit”) of the Society for Medical Education (Gesellschaft für Medizinische Ausbildung, GMA) and on the basis of the American Interprofessional Competence Profile “Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice”. Two courses were designed for interprofessional groups of approximately 15 participants. The learning content was designed interactively through the development of the project, its application and critical discussion of error reporting systems and security checklists as well as role-plays and video material. The evaluation was carried out by means of descriptive analysis of a structured course evaluation system, which was developed for this study.
Results: 28 students took part in the courses. 82% of the students considered the topic "patient safety" to be relevant. In 82% of the cases, the participants rated the interprofessional aspect of the course as valuable. Overall, 73% of students whished for more interprofessional education.
Conclusion: The results of the evaluation show that the teaching concept is well accepted by the students and encourage the implementation of further interprofessional courses with a thematic relevance.
Aim: Interprofessional teaching and learning is gaining significance in the health professions. At the same time, the development and implementation of such educational courses is demanding. Focusing on factors critical to success, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the experience gathered by eight grant projects in which interprofessional courses were designed. Emphasis is placed on the level of cooperation between the participating educational institutions, course content, the operative implementation of the course units and their permanent integration into curricula.
Method: Data was collected in semi-structured, guideline-based interviews with project leaders and team members (n=43). University and vocational students who had attended the evaluated courses were also included in the survey (n=7) as a means to triangulate data. Analysis was carried out based on qualitative content analysis.
Results: A participatory, dialogue-centered model of cooperation appears to be most suited for developing and implementing courses. Belonging to the factors critical to success are the time when courses are offered, the conditions for attendance, the different teaching and learning cultures of the professions involved, preparation and deployment of instructors, and the role played by project coordination. Permanently integrating interprofessional units into medical curricula revealed itself to be difficult.
Conclusion: While the development and realization of interprofessional courses can be achieved easily enough in projects, curricular integration of the new course units is challenging. In respect to the latter, not only a large amount of staffing resources and time are required, but also the creation of the necessary system-level structures, not just within the educational institutions (organizational development) but also in the frameworks governing the professions.
Introduction: Ward rounds are an essential activity for interprofessional teams in hospital settings and represent complex tasks requiring not only medical knowledge but also communication skills, clinical technical skills, patient management skills and team-work skills. The present study aimed to analyse final year students’, nurses’ as well as physiotherapists’ views on a simulation-based interprofessional ward round training.
Methods: In two successive passes a total number of 29 final year students, nursing students and physiotherapy students (16 in the first run, 13 in the second) volunteered to participate in two standardized patient ward round scenarios: (1) patient with myocardial infarction, and (2) patient with poorly controlled diabetes. Views on the interprofessional ward round training were assessed using focus groups.
Results: Focus group based feedback contained two main categories (A) ward round training benefits and (B) difficulties. Positive aspects enfolded course preparation, setting of the training, the involvement of the participants during training and the positive learning atmosphere. Difficulties were seen in the flawed atmosphere and realization of ward rounds in the daily clinical setting with respect to inter-professional aspects, and course benefit for the different professional groups.
Conclusion: The presented inter-professional ward round training represents a well received and valuable model of interprofessional learning. Further research should assess its effectiveness, processes of interprofessional interplay and transfer into clinical practice.
Introduction: This project report describes the development, “piloting” and evaluation of an interprofessional seminar on team communication bringing together medical students and Interprofessional Health Care B.Sc. students at the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University, Germany.
Project Description: A five-member interprofessional team collaborated together on this project. Kolb’s experiential learning concept formed the theoretical foundation for the seminar, which explored three interprofessional competency areas: team work, communication and values/ethics. Evaluation for the purposes of quality assurance and future curricula development was conducted using two quantitative measures:
descriptive analysis of a standardized course evaluation tool (EvaSys)
ANOVA analysis of the German translation of the University of the West of England Interprofessional Questionnaire (UWE-IP-D).
Results: The key finding from the standardized course evaluation was that the interprofessional seminars were rated more positively [M=2.11 (1 most positive and 5 most negative), SD=1, n=27] than the monoprofessional seminars [M=2.55, SD=0.98, n=90]. The key finding from the UWE-IP-D survey, comparing pre and post scores of the interprofessional (IP) (n=40) and monoprofessional (MP) groups (n=34), was that significant positive changes in mean scores for both groups towards communication, teamwork and interprofessional learning occurred.
Conclusions: Lessons learnt included: a) recognising the benefit of being pragmatic when introducing interprofessional education initiatives, which enabled various logistical and attitudinal barriers to be overcome; b) quantitative evaluation of learning outcomes alone could not explain positive responses or potential influences of interprofessional aspects, which highlighted the need for a mixed methods approach, including qualitative methods, to enrich judgment formation on interprofessional educational outcomes.
Preface The discussion about new forms of cooperation and competencies in the health professions need not primarily take place from the perspective of the occupational groups, but rather on the basis of future expectations of the healthcare system – meaning from the perspective of the patients [1].
Background
The implementation of a bachelor degree in “Interprofessional Health Care” at the University of Heidelberg, Germany has fostered the need to evaluate the impact of this innovative programme. The Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) was developed by Parsell and Bligh (1999) to assess student’s attitudes towards interprofessional education. The RIPLS consists of 19 items and four subscales were identified by McFadyen (J Interprof Care19:595–603, 2005): “teamwork and collaboration”, “negative professional identity”, “positive professional identity” and “roles and responsibilities”. The RIPLS has been translated into a number of languages and used in a variety of different educational settings. A German version of the RIPLS was not available. Aim of the study was the translation of the RIPLS into German and testing of internal consistency.
Methods
The RIPLS was translated to German according to international guidelines and its psychometric properties were assessed in two online surveys with two different samples a) health care graduates and b) health care students. Descriptive analysis (mean, SD, corrected item-total correlation) of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale – German (RIPLS-D) was performed for item characteristics and Cronbach’s Alpha was calculated for internal consistency of overall and subscales of the RIPLS-D.
Results
Each sample consisted of 76 datasets. Reliability for the RIPLS-D overall scale was 0.83 in both samples. The subscales displayed internal consistency between 0.42 and 0.88. Corrected item-total correlation showed low values in two subscales in the sample of graduates.
Conclusions
While the overall RIPLS-D scale is reliable, several subscales showed low values and should be used with caution to measure readiness for interprofessional learning in the German health care context. Internal consistency of the instrument does not seem to be given in health care professionals at different stages of their professional career. In particular the sub-scale “roles and responsibilities” was problematic. For these reasons, the RIPLS-D cannot be recommended for use to assess this concept.
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