Abstract
Background: Inter-professional and interpersonal relationships in collaborative work environments can prove to be critical elements in healthcare practice. When implementers fail to understand the importance of a collaborative perspective, this can lead to communication problems which ultimately harm the users.Objectives: To improve the inter-professional collaborative work skills of Mexican students in their first year of medical and nursing degrees through the use of a training program geared toward development of interpersonal skills and interdisciplinary work.Methods: The sample was composed of 162 students (62 males and 99 females) from the School of Healthcare Sciences of the Autonomous University of Coahuila, Mexico. The main measures used were the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE); the Jefferson Scale of Attitudes toward Inter-Professional Collaborative Work between Medical and Nursing Professionals (JSAPNC); and the Jefferson Scale of Lifelong Learning (JeffSPLL). The entire sample was divided into two groups (experimental and control groups). Both groups attended an extra-curricular program using a coaching methodology. In the first case the topic focused on attitudes toward inter-professional collaborative work. In the second case, the program focused on addiction. Both programs ran for 4 months. Psychometric instruments were applied at the beginning and at the end of both programs. After analyzing the reliability of the instruments, an ANOVA test was performed.Results: The control group of medical students showed a deterioration in the development of collaborative work skills (p < 0.01), whereas in the experimental group this deterioration was not present. In the experimental group of nursing students, a significant increase in the development of collaborative work skills (p < 0.05) was observed. The differences were clearly due to the professional area of study (p < 0.001).Conclusion: There are differences in collaborative work skill development among different professional areas. These differences can be reduced through the implementation of a program aimed at developing collaborative work and interpersonal skills in the early stages of training.
Highlights
In physicians and healthcare professionals, professionalism refers to the set of skills and values that characterizes the essence of humanism in professional work (Vivanco and DelgadoBolton, 2015)
A definition from the medical research field suggests that medical professionalism is achieved by mastering three essential areas: clinical skills, communication skills, and an appropriate understanding of the ethical and legal framework of professional behavior (Stern, 2006)
Communication skills are not limited to patients and their families, and relate to other healthcare professionals who are part of the inter-professional team which works at the healthcare institutions
Summary
In physicians and healthcare professionals, professionalism refers to the set of skills and values that characterizes the essence of humanism in professional work (Vivanco and DelgadoBolton, 2015). According to the World Health Organization (2010), this inter-professional collaboration, called teamwork, is described as the ability of “multiple healthcare workers from different professional backgrounds to provide comprehensive services by working with patients, their families, their professional careers, and the community, in order to deliver the highest quality of healthcare across settings.”. Benefits of this teamwork have been described in recent publications in healthcare institutions (Pedrazza et al, 2017). When implementers fail to understand the importance of a collaborative perspective, this can lead to communication problems which harm the users
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