Journal of interprofessional care
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Interprofessional care teams are the backbone of intensive care units (ICUs) where severity of illness is high and care requires varied skills and experience. Despite this care model, longitudinal educational programmes for such workplace teams rarely include all professions. In this article, we report findings on the initial assessment and evaluation of an ongoing, longitudinal simulation-based curriculum for interprofessional workplace critical care teams. ⋯ Successes identified by curricular evaluation included authentic critical care curricular content, safe learning environment, and team comradery from shared experience. Barriers included unfamiliarity with the simulation environment and clinical coverage for curricular participation. This study suggests that a sustainable interprofessional curriculum for workplace ICU critical care teams can achieve the desired educational impact and effectively deliver authentic simulated work experiences if barriers to educational engagement and participation can be overcome.
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Interprofessional education (IPE) improves collaboration and patient care through joint education between health professions. Respiratory therapy (RT) has not been previously evaluated as participants in IPE. A cross-sectional online survey was distributed to evaluate the opportunities and barriers towards IPE of 874 respiratory therapy faculty with both quantitative measures and open-ended questions. ⋯ Faculty responses indicate the importance of IPE, barriers related to schedule and faculty attitudes, and perceived opportunities for IPE with nursing programs and through increasing simulation training opportunities. The most common barriers identified were faculty attitudes, scheduling and logistics, curriculum requirements, administration, and time. All faculty seemed to perceive similar opportunities and barriers regardless of programme type and are supportive of IPE inclusion within their curriculums.
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In the United Kingdom, pharmacist and nurse independent prescribers are responsible for both the clinical assessment of and prescribing for patients. Prescribing is a complex skill that entails the application of knowledge, skills, and clinical reasoning to arrive at a clinically appropriate decision. Decision-making is influenced and informed by many factors. ⋯ Exploration of this behaviour in the interviews revealed that previous experience and attitudes such as confidence and cautiousness associated with responsibility were strong influencers within the decision-making process. In addition, strengthening the professional identity of prescribers could be achieved through collaborative work with interprofessional healthcare teams to orient their professional practice from within the profession. Findings from this study can be used to inform the education, training, and practice of independent prescribers to improve healthcare services by improving their professional and interprofessional development.
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Interprofessional education (IPE) provides students with opportunities to learn about the roles and responsibilities of other professions and develop communication and teamwork skills. As different health professions have recognised the importance of IPE, the number of disciplines participating in IPE events is increasing. Consequently, it is important to examine the effect group structure has on the learning environment and student knowledge acquisition during IPE events. ⋯ It was concluded a case-based IPE forum with students from numerous health professions participating in a discussion about broad case scenarios was moderately effective at introducing students to other health professions and increasing their knowledge of others' identities. However, a smaller grouping of professions with targeted cases was more effective at influencing student perceptions of the need for teamwork. When planning an IPE event, faculty should focus on intentional groupings of professions to reflect the social context of healthcare teams so all students can fully participate and experience shared learning.
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High quality care relies on interprofessional teamwork. We developed a short simulation-based course for final year medical, nursing and nursing anaesthesia students, using scenarios from emergency medicine. The aim of this paper is to describe the adaptation of an interprofessional simulation course in an undergraduate setting and to report participants' experiences with the course and students' learning outcomes. ⋯ The facilitators observed that nursing anaesthesia students seemed to be more comfortable in finding their role in the team than the two other groups. In conclusion, we found that an interprofessional simulation-based emergency team training course with a focus on leadership, communication and teamwork, was feasible to run on a regular basis for large groups of students. The course improved the students' team skills and received a favourable evaluation from both students and faculty.