The Development of an Instrument for Measuring Interprofessional Collaborative Practice Competency of Health Sciences Students

Abstract

Different interprofessional frameworks have been developed. To evaluate students’ collaborativepractice competency correctly, it is necessary to find a reliable, suitable, and valid instrument. Thisstudy aimed to develop a tool to measure interprofessional collaborative practice competency of Thaihealth sciences Students. This research and development were divided into 5 phases: 1) Studying corecompetency and behavioral indicators; 2) examining content validity of the behavioral indicators;3) creating a competency measurement tool and determining scoring criteria; 4) testing the tool andchecking its reliability, and 5) assessing interprofessional collaborative practice competency of healthsciences students.The results showed that the interprofessional collaborative practice competency consisted of 6 keycomponents: 1) patient-centered care, 2) role clarification, 3) team functioning, 4) collaborative leadership,5) learning and reflection, and 6) knowledge. There were 30 behavioral indicators with the index ofitem-objective congruence (IOC) between 0.6-1.00 and the content validity index (CVI) of 0.92. Thereliability of the whole tool was 0.93 and each aspect was 0.76, 0.77, 0.75, 0.79, 0.81, 0.77, respectively.The tool was able to classify the competency of health science students between those who had and didnot have experience in participating in interprofessional teaching programs. The psychometric analysisof this tool supported its value in measuring the interprofessional collaborative practice competencyof Thai health science students. As this study was a cross-sectional study, further assessment for the interprofessional collaborative practice competency among Thai health science students with the longitudinal design is needed.