Abstract
Interprofessional education is essential in that it helps healthcare disciplines better utilize each other and provide team-based collaboration that improves patient care. Many pharmacy training programs struggle to implement interprofessional education. This purpose of the study was to examine the effect of a 30-h interprofessional training that included pharmacy students to determine if the training helped these students build valuable knowledge and skills while working alongside other health care professions. The interprofessional training included graduate-level trainees from pharmacy, behavioral health, nursing, and family medicine programs where the trainees worked within teams to build interprofessional education competencies based on the Interprofessional Education Collaborative core competencies. Sixteen pharmacy trainees participated in the training and completed pre- and post-test measures. Data were collected over a two-year period with participants completing the Team Skills Scale and the Interprofessional Attitudes Scale. Paired sample t-tests indicated that, after this training, pharmacy trainees showed significant increases in feeling better able to work in healthcare teams and valuing interprofessional practice.
Highlights
Pharmacists play a critical role within the healthcare team in a variety of pharmacy practice settings
Thirty-two trainees participate in this interprofessional immersion each year and this article focuses on the 16 pharmacy students who participated during the summers of 2016 and 2017
There was a significant increase in the pharmacy trainees reported attitudes indicating that they valued working within a healthcare team [t (15) = −3.18, p = 0.006] with the pre-test Interprofessional Attitudes Scale (IPAS) teamwork scores being lower (M = 4.41, SD = 0.45, than the post-test scores (M = 4.75, SD = 0.29)
Summary
Pharmacists play a critical role within the healthcare team in a variety of pharmacy practice settings. Their role on the interprofessional healthcare team has become increasingly influential in terms of ensuring patient safety and good health outcomes. Pharmacist interventions improve the process of patient care and clinical outcomes through the use of medication and therapeutic management, patient counseling, and professional health education [1]. Interactions between patients, healthcare professionals, other pharmacists and support personnel require effective communication skills to ensure patient safety and good health outcomes. Due to the complexity of healthcare delivery and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, interprofessional education (IPE) has been implemented in health professional education to provide the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to work effectively in a multidisciplinary setting [2,3].
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