Tearing Down the Wall: Identification of Biases as a First Step in Building a Team Mentality and Preparing Physician Assistant, Social Work, Nursing, and Medical Students to Participate in Interprofessional Education and Practice

Abstract

The Institute of Medicine’s landmark study on patient care outcomes, A Bridge to Quality, called for interprofessional education and practice that prepares healthcare students from different healthcare professions to collaborate for optimal patient safety. Additional benefits of interprofessional education include increased patient satisfaction and provider job satisfaction. Despite this knowledge, IPE interventions are not widely instituted in health professions education. In July of 2013, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education released a common standard for IPE in the US due to the realization that collaboration will play a large role in the careers of students across the health professions. More research is needed to demonstrate what components, sequencing, and frequency of interprofessional education contributes the greatest value to the competency goals established by the Interprofessional Education Collaborative. This study aims to determine if a novel curricular component, a program entitled, the “Medical Wall,” is able to demonstrate a positive impact on students’ interest and value for interprofessional education, and if the activity has a significant effect on student’s knowledge of barriers to effective team communication and collaboration, and their attitudes regarding the values and ethics of interprofessional collaboration as it relates to patient care. 196 MD, BSN and PA students were randomized into intervention and control groups. All students randomized into the intervention group were further randomized into mixed‐professions small groups who participated in the Medical Wall program, while their peers in the control group completed an alternate and unrelated activity. All participants took the validated pre‐ and post Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale survey to determine if there was significant intervention impact. The learning scale assessed four categories: Teamwork, Negative Professional Identity, Positive Professional Identity and Roles and Responsibilities. The “The Medical Wall” IPE intervention resulted in significant improvement in two out of four categories of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale compared to controls (p value set at <0.05). These results indicate that participation in a brief interprofessional education intervention is effective for enhancing Nursing, Physician Assistant, and M