Interprofessional Professionalism: Bridging Academic and Clinical Environments
Purpose:
This interactive educational session will be facilitated by professionals from several health professions disciplines that are members of the Interprofessional Professionalism Collaborative (IPC). By viewing video case vignettes, attendees will utilize resources from the Interprofessional Professionalism (IPP) Tool Kit and the Interprofessional Professionalism Assessment (IPA) to assist with planning and assessing IPP activities within the context of physical therapy education students involved in interprofessional didactic and clinical education settings.
Methods and/or Description of Project:
The IPP Tool Kit is a web-based resource freely available to educators and practitioners to foster IPP to impact health outcomes for individuals and populations. This dynamic resource builds upon prior research conducted to develop the IPP construct and the Interprofessional Professionalism Assessment (IPA) (Frost, et al, 2018). The IPP Tool Kit includes video case vignettes, instructional guidance for faculty and practitioner use in education and practice, and references. The case vignettes demonstrate various interprofessional team members addressing core values of the IPA in situations that are based on real life scenarios.
The IPA contains 26 items representing six domains of professionalism (altruism and caring, excellence, ethics, respect, communication, accountability), and was tested by 233 preceptors rating health profession learners in the final year of the learners’ training. These preceptors represented 30 different academic institutions across the U.S., worked in various types of practice sites, and evaluated learners representing 10 different entry-level health professions.
Results/Outcomes:
Exploratory factor analysis of the IPA suggested four factors (communication, respect, excellence, altruism and caring) and confirmed, for the most part, a priori expectations. Internal consistency reliability coefficients for the entire instrument and its four subscales were all greater than 0.9.
Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme:
This session embodies the both the theme of this conference to discover a new world of opportunities and the subtheme to build bridges for the future through curricular and clinical innovations. The use of interprofessional education and collaboration to bridge academic and workplace learning is key in today’s health care environment.
Though individual professions, such as physical therapy, define what professionalism means within our own scope of practice, IPP describes how health professions perform with each other when collaborating on a team with their focus on the patient. Application of the IPA, as a component of the IPP Tool Kit is a valid and reliable means for understanding, assessing, and developing interprofessional professionalism.