Effectiveness of spiritual interventions on psychological outcomes and quality of life among paediatric patients with cancer: a study protocol for a systematic review.

INTRODUCTION: Cancer and its treatment affect children's physical, psychological and social well-being throughout the disease trajectory. Spiritual well-being is a fundamental dimension of people's overall health and is considered a source of strength to motivate patients to cope with and adapt to their disease. Appropriate spiritual interventions are important to mitigate the psychological impact of cancer on children, with an ultimate goal of improving their quality of life (QoL) throughout the treatment course. However, the overall effectiveness of spiritual interventions for paediatric patients with cancer remains unclear. This paper describes a protocol to systematically summarise the characteristics of studies related to existing spiritual interventions and synthesise their effectiveness on psychological outcomes and QoL among children with cancer. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Ten databases will be searched to identify appropriate literature: MEDLINE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, LILACS, OpenSIGLE, the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, the Chinese Medical Current Contents and the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure. All randomised controlled trials that meet our inclusion criteria will be included. The primary outcome will be QoL as evaluated by self-reported measures. The secondary outcomes will be self-reported or objectively measured psychological outcomes, including anxiety and depression. Review Manager V.5.3 will be used to synthesise the data, calculate treatment effects, perform any subgroup analyses and assess the risk of bias in included studies. ETHICAL AND DISSEMINATION: The results will be presented at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals. As no individual data will be involved in this review, ethical approval is not required.

Interprofessional Team-Based Learning: A Qualitative Study on the Experiences of Nursing and Physiotherapy Students.

Traditional discipline-specific training has limitations in facilitating inter-professional communication and collaboration. To address this issue, two local universities in Hong Kong launched an interprofessional team-based learning program to allow the undergraduate healthcare students to form teams and experience collaborative problem-solving. This study aimed to evaluate the experiences of nursing and physiotherapy undergraduates following interprofessional learning activities. Twenty-seven 3rd-year nursing and physiotherapy undergraduates were recruited through purposive sampling. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and written feedback was solicited until data saturation was achieved. An inductive thematic analysis was used for the data, and each theme was mutually exclusive. The findings revealed the positive experiences of the students with this interprofessional learning activity. Three main themes emerged: (1) the process of interprofessional learning; (2) profession-related outcomes of interprofessional learning; and (3) patient-related outcomes of interprofessional learning. The study indicated that interprofessional team-based learning activities enhanced learning experiences of the students through interactive learning with other healthcare students. Experiences of relationships that are trustful and complementary allow students to develop confidence in knowledge transfer and in interprofessional collaboration, as well as in providing a holistic patient-centered care. These findings substantiate the importance and value of interprofessional learning in healthcare education.

Implementation of an interprofessional team-based learning program involving seven undergraduate health and social care programs from two universities, and students' evaluation of their readiness for interprofessional learning.

BACKGROUND: Interprofessional learning is gaining momentum in revolutionizing healthcare education. During the academic year 2015/16, seven undergraduate-entry health and social care programs from two universities in Hong Kong took part in an interprofessional education program. Based on considerations such as the large number of students involved and the need to incorporate adult learning principles, team-based learning was adopted as the pedagogy for the program, which was therefore called the interprofessional team-based learning program (IPTBL). The authors describe the development and implementation of the IPTBL program and evaluate the effectiveness of the program implementation. METHODS: Eight hundred and one students, who are predominantly Chinese, participated in the IPTBL. The quantitative design (a pretest-posttest experimental design) was utilized to examine the students' gains on their readiness to engage in interprofessional education (IPE). RESULTS: Three instructional units (IUs) were implemented, each around a clinical area which could engage students from complementary health and social care disciplines. Each IU followed a team-based learning (TBL) process: pre-class study, individual readiness assurance test, team readiness assurance test, appeal, feedback, and application exercise. An electronic platform was developed and was progressively introduced in the three IUs. The students' self-perceived attainment of the IPE learning outcomes was high. Across all four subscales of RIPLS, there was significant improvement in student's readiness to engage in interprofessional learning after the IPTBL. A number of challenges were identified: significant time involvement of the teachers, difficulty in matching students from different programs, difficulty in making IPTBL count towards a summative assessment score, difficulty in developing the LAMS platform, logistics difficulty in managing paper TBL, and inappropriateness of the venue. CONCLUSIONS: Despite some challenges in developing and implementing the IPTBL program, our experience showed that TBL is a viable pedagogy to be used in interprofessional education involving hundreds of students. The significant improvement in all four subscales of RIPLS showed the effects of the IPTBL program in preparing students for collaborative practice. Factors that contributed to the success of the use of TBL for IPE are discussed.