Abstract:
Interprofessional education (IPE) is of growing interest for colleges and universities, because it has become a mechanism for training future health professionals to be competent in collaborative practice. The purpose of this study was to explore perceptions of challenges and methods of collaboration among graduate students from six different health profession-related degree programs who participated in an IPE-related simulation. A survey was provided to participants at the end of the simulation. This study used a de-identified dataset omitting student IDs. Theming was used to analyze 143 participant responses to open-ended questions. Each response was coded as only one theme, producing frequencies of themes for all participants and each health profession. The responses were grouped into 10 themes for perceptions of challenges and 13 themes for methods of collaboration. Among all participants, the top three leading perceived challenges were interprofessional collaboration (33.6%), role identification (13.9%), and planning (13.1%). The top three leading methods of collaboration were helping hand (17.9%), sharing ideas (13.6%), and patient identification (12.1%). The different themes provided insight that differences among the simulation experiences of graduate students from six different health professions may exist. Future studies should continue to explore student experiences during simulations. These experiences can help in understanding the effects of IPE on collaborative practice.
