What factors facilitate interprofessional collaboration outcomes in interprofessional education? A multi-level perspective.

OBJECTIVES: Interprofessional education (IPE) harnesses the power of teams to facilitate collaborative learning across disciplines. However, prior research has not paid sufficient attention to the role of team-level factors on IPE outcomes, posing a major theoretical and methodological limitation. In response to this, using social interdependence theory (SIT), this study aimed to delineate the independent contributions of both team-level and student-level interprofessional attitudes (teamwork, roles, and responsibilities; patient-centeredness; and community-centeredness) in predicting IPE collaboration outcomes (goal achievement, team effectiveness, and team performance) employing multi-level analysis. METHODS: To test whether interprofessional attitudes at the team and student levels predict IPE collaboration outcomes, conducted multilevel modeling. We used the pretest and posttest data from 323 healthcare students in Hong Kong from Chinese medicine, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work programmes enrolled in the IPE Cancer module. RESULTS: Among the interprofessional attitudes, "teamwork, roles, and responsibilities" was found to be the best predictor of IPE outcomes, both at the student and team levels. Students who recognized the benefits of shared learning had better goal achievement and team effectiveness. Furthermore, teams that emphasized shared learning also had better overall team performance. CONCLUSIONS: Students' attitudes towards teamwork, roles, and responsibilities in interprofessional collaborative practice, both at the student and team levels, are important to attaining positive student- and team-level outcomes. The study contributes to the expansion of existing knowledge in medical education, theoretically, by adopting SIT as a lens through which collaborative learning in healthcare teams can be understood, and methodologically, by applying multi-level approaches and delineating important student- and team-level predictors of IPE outcomes.

What characterize high and low achieving teams in Interprofessional education: A self-determination theory perspective.

OBJECTIVES: Calls to promote team-based interprofessional collaborative practice in managing patients with complex health problems are ubiquitous. However, the literature remains silent on what characterises successful teams in interprofessional education (IPE) and on profiling successful teams. To help conceptualise successful teams, this study investigated the differences in attitudes and achievement between high- and low-performing teams in an online asynchronous and synchronous IPE programme, and the role of autonomous motivation in determining team membership. METHODS: Using extreme case sampling involving health and social care students, we identified ten high-performing teams and seven low-performing teams based on their team composite scores on three interprofessional collaborative outcomes: team effectiveness, goal achievement, and scores on the readiness assurance test. Each team had five to seven members of diverse backgrounds. Independent t-tests were performed to identify differences in interprofessional collaborative outcomes, namely teamwork and collaboration, patient-centredness, diversity and ethics, community-centeredness, and interprofessional biases for the affective domain and application exercise for the cognitive domain. We employed logistic regression in which autonomous motivation was used to predict group membership. RESULTS: High-performing teams were characterised as those whose members endorsed or valued "teamwork and collaboration" in IPE simulations. Compared with the low-performing groups, they better recognised and endorsed diversity and ethics, patient-centeredness, and community-centeredness. Membership to high- and low-performing teams was linked to autonomous motivation. CONCLUSIONS: High-performing teams have higher favourable valuing of important interprofessional collaborative competencies, and membership to which is predicted by autonomous motivation. The results suggest the need to pay special attention to struggling teams to facilitate desirable collaborative competencies, especially in terms of members' motivation. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.

To IPAS or not to IPAS? Examining the construct validity of the Interprofessional Attitudes Scale in Hong Kong.

Students' attitudes toward interprofessional teamwork can be linked to successful interprofessional education. This points to the importance of identifying a scale that may be useful in keeping track of the change in students' attitudes over time. In response to this, using a combination of within- and between-network approaches to construct validity, we examined the psychometric acceptability of the Interprofessional Attitude Scale (IPAS) involving 274 Chinese healthcare and social care pre-licensure students in Hong Kong. Overall results indicated that IPAS had good internal consistency. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis provided support to the overall five-factor solution although one negatively worded item obtained non-significant factor loading. Results of the between-network analysis suggest that various subscales of IPAS correlated systematically with other theoretically relevant variables: teamwork attitudes, communication, and team effectiveness. The IPAS is a valid measure to examine predominantly Chinese healthcare and social care students' interprofessional attitudes in online interprofessional education.