Attitudes of Undergraduate Public Health and Health Science Students towards Interprofessional Education (IPE) at a California University

Abstract

Introduction: The study revealed that many healthcare professional students begin their academic studies with positive and high expectations towards interprofessional collaborative studies. Unfortunately, students lose interest if their initial expectations are not met with consistent opportunities to enhance their communication skills and better understand the different healthcare professions. The study aimed to explore health science and public health students’ attitudes toward IPE. The participants’ backgrounds and demographics were used as the variations for the study. Methods: A pre-post semi-quantitative anonymous survey was designed to assess health science and public health undergraduate students’ attitudes toward IPE. The reason for this design was to capture the participants’ attitudes toward IPE at the start of a semester when they had no academic exposure to IPE. Qualtrics was used to collect the research data. A valid and reliable scale was used to measure attitudes toward IPE. A post-survey was included to measure the participants’ change in attitude toward IPE during the semester. The goal was to measure the IPE curriculum effectiveness. There were 21 survey questions. The questions were divided into four validated subscales. The first seven questions (Questions 1 - 7) pertained to the participants’ demographics s, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, major field of study, and prior education. Questions 8, 9, 16, & 20 were designed to determine how the participants perceived their roles and responsibilities in their future healthcare careers. Each IPE attitude question’s central tendency and demographic variations were measured. The correlation between demographics and IPE attitudes was measured. Results: The pre-survey had 192 participants, and the post-survey had 97 participants. The pre-survey had 87% of participants in the age group 17 - 25 years, while the post-survey had 82.5% in the same age group. Only 5.7% of the participants were 36 years or older in the pre-survey and 9.3% in the post-survey. The participants were 80.70% female in the pre-survey and 85.6% in the post-survey. The largest healthcare career field concentration was nursing, with 42.7% and 45.4% in the pre- and post-surveys. The other three larger career fields were healthcare administration, community health education, and physician assistant. The participants’ attitudes toward learning with different healthcare career students and becoming more effective members of a healthcare team increased from 4.36 (SD = 0.13) to 4.40 (SD = 0.17). Two negative IPE attitude questions showed an increased value: 1) The function of nursing therapists is mainly to provide support for doctors (3.51, SD = 0.19 to 3.12, SD = 0.24, p-value ≤ 0.004) and 2) Clinical and healthcare problem-solving skills could only be learned with students from the same career field (3.73, SD = 0.13 to 3.31, SD = 0.24, p-value ≤ 0.001). Conclusion: Interprofessional Education in an academic setting is essential to help healthcare students prepare and succeed in their future healthcare careers. The study results show that health science and public health students understand IPE and value academic exposure to the IPE process during their studies. Academic healthcare programs should continue integrating the IPE learning model and content throughout the student’s academic journey. The variations in IPE attitude do not significantly vary based on demographics and healthcare career fields. This study only represents a sample size of the many healthcare careers. Interprofessional communication and collaboration are essential to the future healthcare delivery challenges we face. For this reason, IPE should be integrated into healthcare education for all health science and public health students. It is recommended that more research should be done on creative curriculum design to get students more engaged in various healthcare IPE learning activities.