Effectiveness of an interprofessional education model based on the transtheoretical model of behaviour change to improve interprofessional collaboration

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of an interprofessional education model (IPE) based on the transtheoretical model to improve the participants’ interprofessional collaborative practice. The study was conducted in Iran using a controlled before-and-after study design. The participants (n = 91) were the residents of emergency medicine and nurses of the emergency units from two teaching hospitals affiliated to Iran University of Medical Sciences. The participants in the intervention group (n = 40) were 22 residents and 18 nurses. The control group (n = 51) consisted of 20 residents and 31 nurses. The participants were classified based on their stage of readiness to change. The interventions were two-day workshops for each stage (i.e., attitude and intention). We used the Interprofessional Collaborator Assessment Rubric (ICAR) to assess the effectiveness of the developed model. The interprofessional collaboration of the participants in the intervention and control groups was assessed at four time points before and after the intervention in the real emergency unit environment. Student’s t-test and repeated measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) were used to analyse the data. We used partial eta-squared (η²) for effect size calculations. The mean values of ICAR scores in the intervention and control groups were 95.63 ± 19.14 and 89.19 ± 16.11 before the intervention. The mean values of ICAR scores at 3 months after the intervention were 99.82 ± 22.32 and 88.29 ± 16.87 in the intervention and control groups, respectively. After 6 months, the mean values of ICAR scores of the intervention and control groups were 98.6 ± 23.40 and 87.98 ± 16.01, respectively. The results showed that the intervention had a medium educational effect size (partial η² = 0.06) on performance of the participants. Our results showed that an IPE model that is tailored to the learners’ stage of readiness to change improves interprofessional collaboration in the participants. The developed model could be applied for improving interprofessional collaborative performance in other IPE programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluation
• interprofessional collaboration
• interprofessional education
• performance
• stages of change
• transtheoretical model

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Professor Mohammad Farsi, Dr. Marzieh Fathi, and Dr. Saieed Abbasi for their kind contribution in this research and the emergency residents and nurses at IUMS who participated in the study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Funding

This research has been supported by Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by Tehran University of Medical Sciences.