Examining the perceived impact of an ethics workshop on interprofessional values and teamwork

ABSTRACT

Interprofessional education (IPE) is a vital component of healthcare education yet challenges to implementation persist. This study aimed to evaluate the perceived impact of an ethics-based IPE workshop designed for professional phase healthcare students enrolled in athletic training, health management systems, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant studies, and speech-language pathology programmes at one university. A pre/post-test cohort study was conducted to evaluate the impact of the workshop on interprofessional values and teamwork. Findings from the 61 students who completed both pre- and post-programme evaluation surveys suggest that the ethics-based workshop was successful in improving perceived confidence as related to the workshop objectives and strengthened positive perceptions of IPE as evaluated by the Student Perceptions of Interprofessional Clinical Education-Revised (SPICE-R). Analysis of responses to open-ended reflection questions after the workshop suggest that student participants perceived changes in understanding related to multiple areas of IPE. These results suggest that an ethics-based workshop using case-based collaborative pedagogy may be an effective mechanism for delivery of IPE-oriented information resulting in greater student confidence and understanding of IPE competencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Confidence
• ethics
• evaluation
• interprofessional education
• mixed methods; perceptions

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Caryssa McCool and Morgan Ricker who assisted in qualitative data analysis for this manuscript.

Declaration of interest

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