When less is more: validating a brief scale to rate interprofessional team competencies

ABSTRACT

Background: There is a need for validated and easy-to-apply behavior-based tools for assessing interprofessional team competencies in clinical settings. The seven-item observer-based Modified McMaster-Ottawa scale was developed for the Team Objective Structured Clinical Encounter (TOSCE) to assess individual and team performance in interprofessional patient encounters.

Objective: We aimed to improve scale usability for clinical settings by reducing item numbers while maintaining generalizability; and to explore the minimum number of observed cases required to achieve modest generalizability for giving feedback.

Design: We administered a two-station TOSCE in April 2016 to 63 students split into 16 newly-formed teams, each consisting of four professions. The stations were of similar difficulty. We trained sixteen faculty to rate two teams each. We examined individual and team performance scores using generalizability (G) theory and principal component analysis (PCA).

Results: The seven-item scale shows modest generalizability (.75) with individual scores. PCA revealed multicollinearity and singularity among scale items and we identified three potential items for removal. Reducing items for individual scores from seven to four (measuring Collaboration, Roles, Patient/Family-centeredness, and Conflict Management) changed scale generalizability from .75 to .73. Performance assessment with two cases is associated with reasonable generalizability (.73). Students in newly-formed interprofessional teams show a learning curve after one patient encounter. Team scores from a two-station TOSCE demonstrate low generalizability whether the scale consisted of four (.53) or seven items (.55).

Conclusion: The four-item Modified McMaster-Ottawa scale for assessing individual performance in interprofessional teams retains the generalizability and validity of the seven-item scale. Observation of students in teams interacting with two different patients provides reasonably reliable ratings for giving feedback. The four-item scale has potential for assessing individual student skills and the impact of IPE curricula in clinical practice settings.

Abbreviations: IPE: Interprofessional education; SP: Standardized patient; TOSCE: Team objective structured clinical encounter

KEYWORDS:

• Interprofessional education
• team behaviors
• assessment
• team objective structured clinical encounter
• validation
• rating scale

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the students and faculty who participated in the project, to Cha Chi Fung, PhD, for manuscript review, and Andrew Velasco, BSc, for technical support and manuscript preparation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Previous presentations

Presented as a research abstract at the Innovations in Medical Education meeting, San Gabriel, CA, USA, on 26 February, 2017

Additional information

Funding

This project is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under grant #D57HP23251 Physician Assistant Training in Primary Care, 2011-2017. The information or content and conclusions are those of the author and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsement be inferred by HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government;