Experiential learning exercise to achieve objective assessment of interprofessional education

Abstract

Abstract At the undergraduate medical education level, many U.S. medical students have only experienced interprofessional patient care by observation or intermittent discussion-based educational activities. However, we believe medical students will gain the most impactful understanding of the allied health professionals they will collaborate with in the future through both real or simulated practice as learners as well as witnessing the direct benefit to patient care. Given the lack of objective assessment of interprofessional education (IPE) competencies, specifically those with a direct impact on patients, we developed an innovative simulated exercise focusing on a medical student discharge plan before and after an interprofessional team meeting. We hypothesized that the interprofessional team of medical, nursing, and pharmacy students will assist the medical student in producing a discharge summary with higher specificity and completeness than a discharge summary produced by a medical student alone. Data obtained from discharge plan scoring and post-intervention narrative survey was analyzed via convergent parallel mixed-methods design. The mean post-intervention score of the discharge plan showed improvement, but did not meet statistical significance. However, when evaluated by each individual domain, the Follow-up section of the post-intervention discharge plan showed significant improvement. This exercise is a first step in the direction of obtaining more objective outcomes data as a result of students engaging in simulated interprofessional team-based care. Evaluation data demonstrated a positive trend towards a more comprehensive, and by extension, safer discharge plan. We are hopeful that our work contributes to other exercises intended to help move from students merely “enjoying” the IPE experience toward demonstrating the first-hand benefit to patients, which substantiates and supports the motivation for future physicians to move toward competence in team based care.