A Qualitative Analysis of Community Participants' Experiences with a Virtual Interprofessional Team Visit (vIPTV) with Healthcare Students.

Healthcare students must develop essential interprofessional skills to provide efficient, safe, and effective patient-centered care. To ensure students receive the proper training to develop these skills, an interprofessional team visit (IPTV) program was established at a large urban university in 2011. The program involved teams of students from nine disciplines conducting home visits with community participants to provide patient-centered care and educational resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the IPTV program transitioned to a virtual delivery first piloted in 2020. The aims of this study were to evaluate the community participants' experiences with virtual IPTV (vIPTV), identify benefits and challenges related to transitioning from in-person to virtual delivery, and utilize participants' feedback to improve the IPTV program. Focus groups with 39 total participants were conducted in seven different sessions during December 2021 and January 2022. Qualitative analysis of the data showed that participants value the IPTV program, had positive experiences with the virtual delivery, and desire personalized interactions. Community participant's feedback can enhance virtual educational experiences for healthcare students' training.

The Journey of an Interprofessional Diabetes Education Student-Run Free Clinic: Where Do We Go from Here?

Future health professionals must be able to function well in a dynamic team-based environment. Interprofessional education aims to enable health professional students to collaborate on teams while working toward common goals. The Diabetes Education Wellness (DEW) Clinic was established in 2011 as an interprofessional, student-run, free clinic to educate the underserved in the community about the risks and management of diabetes. Twenty-four staff and students participated in a focus group addressing perspectives and attitudes toward interprofessional education and improvements for the clinic. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data to identify emerging themes. Five themes emerged: 1) interprofessional collaboration allows for exposure to other professional roles specific to diabetes, 2) the interprofessional clinic provides students with a practical application in a real-life context, 3) interprofessional experiential collaboration provides exposure to other resources allowing for a more comprehensive approach to treating patients, 4) integrated team tables with complementary disciplines provide the best patient outcomes, and 5) the need for "mock clinic" format for orientation. Participants in the study indicated that interprofessional collaboration was beneficial. The clinic provided students with invaluable first-hand experiences serving individuals with type-2 diabetes, learning alongside healthcare workers, and taking the lead at problem-solving.

Validity of a Wireless Gait Analysis Tool (Wi-GAT) in assessing spatio-temporal gait parameters at slow, preferred and fast walking speeds.

BACKGROUND: The wireless gait assessment tool (Wi-GAT) measures have been shown to have good to excellent concurrent validity with preferred walking speeds, however, the validity of the Wi-GAT measures at slow and fast walking speeds is unknown. OBJECTIVE: To establish validity of the Wi-GAT spatio-temporal gait measures at slow, fast, and preferred walking speeds. METHODS: Twenty two healthy adult volunteers, with a mean age of 25.7 (± 5.3) participated in this study. The spatio-temporal gait variables of each participant were concurrently recorded using the GAITrite and the Wi-GAT system, while the participants performed 3 trials for each walking speed in a randomized order. Intraclass correlation analyses were performed to establish the agreement between the measures recorded by the GAITrite and Wi-GAT systems. RESULTS: Walking speed measured both by the Wi-GAT and the GAITrite systems showed excellent agreement for preferred (ICC = 0.979 p< 0.001), slow (ICC = 0.989 p< 0.001) and fast (ICC = 0.967 p< 0.001) walking speeds. Most gait parameters recorded at slow walking speed showed good (ICC > 0.70) to excellent (ICC > 0.85) agreement. CONCLUSIONS: Gait parameters recorded by the Wi-GAT system showed fair to excellent validity for preferred and slow walking speeds.