An Asynchronous Interprofessional Educational Intervention: Mental Health Clinicians and Probation Officers

Abstract

Purpose: This quality improvement (QI) project aimed to change knowledge, motivation, and skills to enhance confidence in interprofessional collaboration among community-based mental health psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) and psychiatrists and county probation officers in working with jail-to-community transitioning adults who experience mental illness.Background: The transition from jail to community is a complex transitional time involving both a situational and health-illness transition for individuals who experience mental illness. Community supervision, or probation, is frequently ordered. Probation officers complete in-depth needs and risk assessments and work to support individuals through transition. Mental health clinicians also complete assessments, but the two professional groups seldom collaborate unless mutual clients are court ordered to treatment. There is an opportunity to build interprofessional collaboration between groups to support this complex transitional period. Methods: This QI project used a quasi-experimental pretest and posttest design with an asynchronous educational video series hosted on Vimeo. Eleven total participants were recruited through convenience sampling and completed pretest and posttest intervention surveys that assessed knowledge, motivation and skills of confidence to conduct interprofessional collaboration. Descriptive statistics were utilized in analysis of survey data. Results: Eleven participants (four mental health clinicians and seven probation professionals) self-identified as eligible and completed pretest and posttest intervention surveys. All participants demonstrated improved confidence ratings and increased knowledge, motivation, and skills in the posttest survey. Conclusion: Asynchronous education for mental health clinicians and probation professionals about the importance of interprofessional collaboration between groups to support mutual clients in jail to community transitions is an effective method to increase confidence of knowledge, motivation and skills of both profession types. Jail to community transition is complex and lacks standardized clinical approaches for guiding care. Interprofessional collaboration ensures patients receive person-centered approaches and treatment supportive of their unique needs.