Health Sciences Faculty Attitude and Readiness Towards Simulation-Based Inter-Professional Education.

OBJECTIVE: To explore attitude and readiness of health sciences faculty towards simulation-based inter-professional education (IPE). STUDY DESIGN: Qualitative case-study; critical realist paradigm as used. Place and Duration of the Study: Bahria University Health Sciences Campus from December 2022 to March 2023. METHODOLOGY: Maximum variation purposive sampling technique was used for selecting the participants. A total of thirty-one participants were selected. Five faculty members from Nursing, five from Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT), five Medical Laboratory Technologists (MLT), eight participants from medical, and eight from the dental faculty. Data were collected using individual semi-structured interviews and two focus group discussion. Duration of an individual interview was 30 minutes and that of the focus group discussion was 60 minutes. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Community of inquiry and community of practice theoretical framework were used for guiding the research design and interviews. Pattern matching technique was used for the data analysis. Atlas ti-9 was used for organising the data. RESULTS: Ten themes were identified after the analysis. teamwork, understanding roles and responsibilities, time constraint communication skills, curriculum integration, patient outcome, interprofessional boundaries, ethics in practice, faculty training, and visionary leadership. CONCLUSION: The faculty members valued interprofessional education but were reluctant to implement it due to the limited resources. There is a need of faculty development for implementation of simulation-based interprofessional education. There is insufficient research on simulation and interprofessional education in Pakistan because of which faculty members are unacquainted of its benefits. KEY WORDS: Interprofessional education, Simulation-based learning, Medical education.

Programmatic Assessment Prototype Design Using Integrated System Thinking And Design Thinking Framework.

Objective: To design a prototype programmatic assessment model using integration of system thinking and design thinking frameworks, and to explore barriers in the way of its implementation in medical education. METHODS: The qualitative case-study was conducted at Bahria University Medical and Dental College, Karachi from September to December 2022. Methodological approaches used were systems thinking and design thinking. Philosophical paradigm used was critical realism. Maximum variation purposive sampling technique was used for selecting faculty members and medical students. Data was collected in two sets of semi-structured interviews. The initial interviews were at the levels of empathise, define and ideate. After that low-fidelity prototype programmatic assessment design was created and presented to the participants. The second set of interviews were focussed on feedback on prototype of programmatic assessment design. Pattern matching method was used for data analysis. RESULTS: Of the 65 subjects, 20(30.7%) were faculty members; 5(25%) lecturers and 5(25%) professors each from basic and clinical sciences. The remaining 45(69.2%) were students; 5(11.1%)from each year of medical and dental streams. Initial interviews revealed that after failure, students struggle to understand the cause of failure as assessment system lacked narrative feedback mechanism and numbers or pass/fail decisions were not self-explanatory. Students lacked attitude towards continued improvement, formative assessment were not taken seriously as they carried only 10% weightage. After the programmatic assessment design was presented to the participants, faculty members voiced concerns regarding faculty training, shortage of resources and legal issues related to its implementation. Students supported the design, especially continued narrative feedback for their academic improvement. Portfolio development was considered a time-consuming task and they had reservations regarding their ability to make quality assessment portfolio. Conclusion: Implementation of programmatic assessment required faculty development and was resource-intensive, but stakeholders, especially students, were found interested in its implementation in medical education.