What is the impact of online community-based multi-disciplinary team simulation, on interprofessional educational competencies, in undergraduate students?

Problem

Increasing demand and an ageing population, requires health and social care teams who can work collaboratively. Interprofessional Education (IPE) aims to address this need by developing attitudes, knowledge, and skills applicable to collaborative practice, but creating IPE learning events can be resource intensive, with multiple timetables, and geographical spacing of participants. Online simulation may help alleviate these challenges but is largely focused on acute situations and few studies appear to address large scale IPE, involving multiple professional groups. We aimed to develop a community-based IPE online simulation that gave students experience of collaborative working, within the wider community health and social care multi-disciplinary team (MDT) and had a positive impact on IPE competences.

Approach

526 students, from nine professions (District Nursing, Medicine, Occupational Therapy, Paramedics, Physician Associates, Pharmacy, Physiotherapy, Social work, and Speech and Language Therapy), accessed the Microsoft Teams platform in small MDT groups, to assess a simulated frail patient, who had fallen in the community. Use of a 360 image, embedded with patient information, and collaborative written workspace, augmented the group experience. IPE competencies were assessed before and after the event, using a questionnaire. The questionnaire, based on a reduced item ISVS-21 (Interprofessional socialization and valuing scale – 21), was designed, and mapped to Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) core competencies, relevant to the event. Likert scales were utilised for 12 items (1= Strongly disagree, 7= strongly agree). Free text reflective questions were included, to provide greater depth to quantitative responses.

Findings

Responses were received from all disciplines (pre-event =149; post-event =198). Cronbach’s alpha was 0.921 for the pre-event questionnaire and 0.926 for the post -event. Due to anonymised online questionnaires, pairing was not possible, 10/12 questionnaire items showed significant self-reported improvement in aligned competencies using an independent t-test (p<0.05). A significant result was not recorded for importance of team approach and patient involvement in decision making, possibly due to high mean scores in the pre-event questionnaire (6.27, 6.48 vs 6.20, 6.44). Qualitative responses were analysed, through the lens of the IPEC competencies and aligned well, revealing themes of teamwork, communication, confidence in own role and roles of others, an appreciation of shared responsibility, and the benefits of an MDT. Overall, online community-based MDT simulation appears to have a positive impact on self-reported IPE competence in undergraduate students.

Consequences

Designing and creating high quality IPE is challenging, and online non-acute MDT simulation can help overcome some of these challenges, whilst also having positive impact on IPE competencies. This method has the capability to be applied to a variety of chronic disease and community-based scenarios, in both undergraduate and postgraduate education. More research is needed to discover if confidence in IPE competencies will translate to improved collaboration in the workplace and enhanced patient care.